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MUCHO MOJO. Copyright © 1994 by Joe R. Lansdale. All rights reserved. No part
of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical
means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission
in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief
passages in a review.
For information address Warner Books, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York,
NY 10020.
The Mysterious Press name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books,
Inc.
A Time Warner Company
ISBN 0-7595-8387-0
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1994 by Mysterious Press.
First eBook edition: May 2001
Visit our Web site at www.iPublish.com
MUCHO RAVES FOR MUCHO MOJO!
*
“A SPRINGLOADED PAGE-TURNER, a mean rattlesnake of a novel that rears up and
sinks its fangs into you when you least expect it. Readers already familiar
with Lansdale’s work won’t want to miss this one, and as for those who
aren’t—where the hell have you been?”
—F. Paul Wilson, author ofThe Select
*
“IT’S THE SNAPPY, FREQUENTLY RAUNCHY DIALOGUE that widens the eyes and
provides the burst of humor. . . . When you read a novel starring Leonard Pine
and Hap Collins, you spend a lot of time laughing and shaking your head.
Emulating an early hero, Mark Twain, he uses crisp dialogue and humor to
leaven serious topics.”
—Rocky Mountain News
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*
“I’ve never read anything like it. Not just a fine mystery full of unexpected
moves, but a better novel about black-white friendship and rural life than
anything I’ve ever read. I LOVED IT, MAN, THOUGHT IT WAS A HOWL FROM BEGINNING
TO END.”
—James Crumley, author ofThe Mexican Tree Duck
*
“JOE LANSDALE IS ONE OF PUBLISHING’S BEST-KEPT SECRETS.”
—Dallas Morning News
*
“SAVAGELY ENTERTAINING . . . TAP DANCES THROUGH TWIN MINEFIELDS OF RACE AND
OFF-BEAT SEX. . . . To read this novel is to live in that terrible and
exhilarating moment between the knife-cut and the pain, between the gush of
blood and the deadly onset of shock.”
—Joe Gores, author ofMenaced Assassin
*
“THOUGHTFUL AND WITTY . . . Lansdale sneaks over philosophic points cleverly.
I can’t remember a more entertaining blueprint for the way blacks and whites,
gays and straights can live in friendship.”
—Charlotte Observer
*
“JOE R. LANSDALE IS A BORN STORYTELLER, ANDMUCHO MOJO is the story he was
born to tell. This is the kind of mystery that would make Agatha Christie hide
under the bed.”
—Robert Bloch, author ofPsycho
*
“SATISFYING . . . EXTRAORDINARILY MEMORABLE. The friendship and smart-ass
patter between Hap and Leonard is so real it’s palpable. The plot is
compelling. And one can practically hear the wind and taste the dust of an
East Texas summer. Damn, this is good.”
—Booklist(starred review)
*
“A GRIPPING PLOT lays bare the East Texas mindset, unexplained murders, and
raw truth about ugly secrets. A GREAT READ.”
—Los Angeles Features Syndicate
*
“A CROSS BETWEEN ROBERT B. PARKER AND STEPHEN KING. . . . It gets your
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attention, that’s for sure.”
—San Jose Mercury News
*
“JOE R. LANSDALE HAS STAKED HIS CLAIM AND STRUCK PAYDIRT with his macabre
tale of a serial killer in MUCHO MOJO. . . . I often found myself grinning
like an idiot while reading MUCHO MOJO, thanks to Lansdale’s strange, often
ribald humor.”
—Mostly Murder
*
“THE PROSE IS HARD-BITTEN, THE TONE DARKLY HUMOROUS.”
—Houston Chronicle
*
“NOT ONLY A TOP-DRAWER THRILLER, BUT A SOCIAL PORTRAIT OF A SOCIETY IN
PAINFUL EVOLUTION. . . . There’s a touch of Harry Crews in him, a streak of
Cormac McCarthy . . . Joe R. Lansdale keeps his own voice, and it’s one well
worth listening to and enjoying. . . . MUCHO MOJO will make you both laugh and
wince, and keep on turning the pages.”
—Locus
*
“MUCHO MOJOIS SOME MAJOR MAGIC . . . as funny as all get-out . . . a story of
richness of character and setting. . . . It’s not inappropriate to place it in
the tradition of cross-cultural buddy novels that goes back throughHuckleberry
Finn. It’s that good.”
—Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinal
*
“A REAL NAIL-BITING PAGE TURNER . . . [with] truly memorable characters . . .
a superbly crafted and compelling murder mystery . . . a worthwhile addition
to the category of the gay mystery.”
—In Step
*
“LANSDALE COULD EASILY SWEEP THE AWARDS. . . . The hypnotic otherworldly
setting alone is worth the read, but the lead characters are wonderfully
charming. Readers can only hope the author will bring them back.”
—Texas Monthly
*
“MORE THAN A MYSTERY,MUCHO MOJO is about friendship, family loyalty, and
pride. . . . Lansdale is one of the best regional novelists around.”
—Killing Time
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*
“BRILLIANTLY EXECUTED. . . . One thing about Lansdale, he’s always exploring
new directions. He’s one of America’s most gifted writers, and MUCHO MOJO
proves why.”
—Time Tunnel
*
“A SUPERB WORK. . . . embraces the mystery field while transcending its every
convention. . . . One of the best novels of the year. . . . READ IT AS SOON AS
POSSIBLE—YOU WON’T BE DISAPPOINTED.”
—BookLovers
*
“Hunting Joe R. Lansdale novels has provided me with many of my most
delicious moments as a book collector. . . . He is this generation’s one and
only answer to Frederic Brown, Seabury Quinn, Manly Wade Wellman, H. P.
Lovecraft, all those gleeful pulp gods of the 1940s. . . . He’s got a wicked
streak the size of the Rio Grande and a compassionate streak at least as long.
HE’S ALREADY PRODUCED THREE FLAT-OUT CLASSICS, AND HE’LL WRITE MORE.”
—Creative Loafing
BYJOER. LANSDALE
Novels
ACT OF LOVE
THE MAGIC WAGON
DEAD IN THE WEST
THE NIGHTRUNNERS
THE DRIVE-IN: A B-Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas
THE DRIVE-IN II: Not Just One of Them Sequels
COLD IN JULY
SAVAGE SEASON
CAPTURED BY THE ENGINES
MUCHO MOJO
THE TWO-BEAR MAMBO
Juvenile
TERROR ON THE HIGH SKIES
Short Story Collections
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BY BIZARRE HANDS
STORIES BY MAMA LANSDALE’S YOUNGEST BOY
BESTSELLERS GUARANTEED
WRITER OF THE PURPLE RAGE
ELECTRIC GUMBO
Anthologies(as Editor)
BEST OF THE WEST
NEW FRONTIERS
RAZORED SADDLES(with Pat LoBrutto)
DARK AT HEART(with Karen Lansdale)
WEIRD BUSINESS (with Rick Klaw)
Nonfiction
THE WEST THAT WAS(with Thomas W. Knowles)
THE WILD WEST SHOW(with Thomas W. Knowles)
THE MYSTERIOUS PRESS
Published by Warner Books
A Time Warner Company
Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
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8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
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38.
39.
About the Author
This book is dedicated with love and respect and the deepest devotion to the
most imortant person in my life. My wife, Karen.
Thanks are in order for some folks who helped see this project through:
Barbara Puechner; Andrew Vachss; Neal Barrett, Jr.; David Webb; and of course,
Jeff Banks. I’d also like to give a nod toward my old rose-field buddies, Sam
Griffith and Larry Walters, and thank my “Aunt” Ardath as well as my karate
instructor, Richard Metteauer.
It doesn’t matter whom you are paired against; your opponent is always
yourself.
—Nakamura
1.
It was July and hot and I was putting out sticks and not thinking one whit
about murder.
All the other rose-field jobs are bad, the budding, the digging, but putting
out sticks, that’s the job they give sinners in Hell.
You do sticks come dead of summer. Way it works is they give you this fistful
of bud wood, and you take that and sigh and turn and look down the length of
the field, which goes on from where you are to some place east of China, and
you gird your loins, bend over, and poke those sticks in the rows a bit apart.
You don’t lift up if you don’t have to, ’cause otherwise you’ll never finish.
You keep your back bent and you keep on poking, right on down that dusty row,
hoping eventually it’ll play out, though it never seems to, and of course that
East Texas sun, which by 10:30A.M. is like an infected blister leaking molten
pus, doesn’t help matters.
So I was out there playing with my sticks, thinking the usual thoughts about
ice tea and sweet, willing women, when the Walking Boss came up and tapped me
on the shoulder.
I thought maybe it was water break, but when I looked up he jerked a thumb
toward the end of the field, said, “Hap, Leonard’s here.”
“He can’t come to work,” I said. “Not unless he can put out sticks with his
cane.”
“Just wants to see you,” the Walking Boss said, and moved away.
I poked in the last stick from my bundle, eased my back straight, and started
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down the center of the long dusty row, passing the bent, sweaty backs of the
others as I went.
I could see Leonard at the far end of the field, leaning on his cane. From
that distance, he looked as if he were made of pipe cleaners and doll clothes.
His raisin-black face was turned in my direction and a heat wave jumped off of
it and vibrated in the bright light and dust from the field swirled
momentarily in the wave and settled slowly.
When Leonard saw I was looking in his direction, his hand flew up like a
grackle taking flight.
Vernon Lacy, my field boss, known affectionately to me as the Old Bastard
though he was my age, decked out in starched white shirt, white pants, and tan
pith helmet, saw me coming too. He came alongside Leonard and looked at me and
made a slow and deliberate mark in his little composition book. Docking my
time, of course.
When I got to the end of the row, which only took a little less time than a
trek across Egypt on a dead camel, I was dust covered and tired from trudging
in the soft dirt. Leonard grinned, said, “Just wanted to know if you could
loan me fifty cents.”
“You made me walk all the way here for fifty cents, I’m gonna see I can fit
that cane up your ass.”
“Let me grease up first, will you?”
Lacy looked over and said, “You’re docked, Collins.”
“Go to hell,” I said.
Lacy swallowed and walked away and didn’t look back.
“Smooth,” Leonard said.
“I pride myself on diplomacy. Now tell me it isn’t fifty cents you want.”
“It isn’t fifty cents I want.”
Leonard was still grinning, but the grin shifted slightly to one side, like a
boat about to take water and sink.
“What’s wrong, buddy?”
“My Uncle Chester,” Leonard said. “He passed.”
* * *
I followed Leonard’s old Buick in my pickup, stopping long enough along the
way to buy some beer and ice. When we arrived at Leonard’s place, we got an
ice chest and filled it with the ice and the beer and carried it out to the
front porch.
Leonard, like myself, didn’t have air-conditioning, and the front porch was
as cool a spot as we could find, unless we went down to the creek and laid in
it.
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We eased into the rickety porch swing and sat the ice chest between us. While
Leonard moved the swing with his good leg, I popped us a couple.
“Happen today?” I asked.
“They found him today. Been dead two or three days. Heart attack. They got
him at the LaBorde Funeral Home, pumped full of juice.”
Leonard sipped his beer and studied the barbed-wire fence on the opposite
side of the road. “See that mockingbird on the fence post, Hap?”
“Why? Is he trying to get my attention?”
“He’s a fat one. You don’t see many that fat.”
“I wonder about that all the time, Leonard. How come mockingbirds don’t
normally get fat. Thought I might write a paper on it.”
“My uncle’s favorite bird. I always thought they were ugly, but he thought
they were the grandest things in the world. He used to call me his little
mockingbird when I was a kid because I mocked him and everybody else. I see
one, I think of him. Hokey, huh?”
I didn’t say anything. I focused my eyes on the floorboards at the edge of
the porch, watched as a hot horsefly staggered on its disease-laden legs,
trying to make the little bit of shade the porch roof provided. The fly
faltered and stopped. Heat-stroke, I figured.
“I want to go to Uncle Chester’s funeral tomorrow,” Leonard said. “But I
don’t know. I feel funny about it. He probably wouldn’t want me there.”
“From what you’ve told me about Uncle Chester, spite of the fact he disowned
you when he found out you were queer—”
“Gay. We say gay now, Hap. You straights need to learn that. When we’re real
drunk, we call each other fags or faggots.”
“Whatever. I’m sure, in his own way, Chester was a good guy. You loved him.
It doesn’t matter what he would have wanted. What matters is what you want.
He’s dead. He’s not making decisions anymore. You want to go to the funeral
and tell him ’bye because of the good things you remember about him, go on.”
“Come with me.”
“Hey, I’m sorry for Uncle Chester on account of what he meant to you, but I
don’t know him from brown rice. Fact is, him dying, you coming around upset,
and me leaving the rose fields like that, I figure I don’t have a job anymore.
He screwed up my income, so why the hell would I want to go to his funeral?”
“Because I want you to and you’re my friend and you don’t want to hurt my
teeny-weeny feelings.”
This was true.
I didn’t like it, but I agreed. Going to a funeral seemed harmless enough.
2.
Funeral was the next day at three in the afternoon, so early next morning we
drove to LaBorde in Leonard’s car and over to J. C. Penney’s.
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We went there to buy suits, something neither Leonard or I had owned in
years. My last suit had had a Nehru collar and a peace symbol about the size
of an El Dorado hubcap on a chain a little smaller than you might need to tow
a butane truck.
Leonard’s last suit had been designed by the military.
Suits from Penney’s didn’t come with a vest and two pairs of pants anymore,
least not the decent ones, and the prices were higher than I remembered. I
thought perhaps we ought to go over to Kmart, see if they had something in
sheen green. Something we got tired of wearing, we could use to upholster a
chair.
I ended up with a dark blue suit and a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie.
I bought black shoes, socks, and a belt. I tried the stuff on and looked at
myself in the mirror. I thought I looked silly. Like a tall, biped pit bull in
mourning.
Leonard bought a dark green Western-cut suit, a canary-yellow shirt, and a
tie striped up in orange and green and yellow. Shoes he got were black with
pointy toes and zippers down the side. Kind of shoes you hoped they stopped
making about the time the Dave Clark Five quit making records.
“You’re gonna bury Uncle Chester,” I said. “Not take him on a Caribbean
cruise. Show up in that, he might jump out of the box and throw a blanket over
you.”
“Jealousy is an ugly thing, Hap.”
“You’re right. I wish I looked like a head-on collision between Dolly Parton
and Peter Max.”
We changed back into our clothes, and I paid up because I was the only one
working these days, even if it was sporadically, and because Leonard never let
me forget it was my fault his leg was messed up. He’d say stuff like, “You
know I got this leg messed up on account of you,” then he’d pick something he
wanted and I’d pay for it, because what he said was true. Wasn’t for him, my
funeral would have come before Uncle Chester’s.
The services were in a little community on the outskirts of LaBorde, and
after we went home and hung out awhile, we put the suits on and drove over in
Leonard’s wreck with no air-conditioning.
Time we got to the Baptist church where the funeral was being held, we had
sweated up good in our new suits, and the hot wind blowing on me made my hair
look as if it had been combed with a bush hog. My overall appearance was of
someone who had been in a fight and lost.
I got out of the car and Leonard came around and said, “You still got the
fucking tag hanging on you.”
I lifted an arm and there was the tag, dangling from the suit sleeve. I felt
like Minnie Pearl. Leonard got out his pocket knife and cut it off and we went
inside the church.
We paraded by the open coffin, and of course, Uncle Chester hadn’t missed his
chance to be guest of honor. He was one ugly sonofabitch, and I figured alive
he hadn’t looked much better. He wasn’t very tall, but he was wide, and being
dead a few days before they found him hadn’t helped his looks any. The
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mortician had only succeeded in making him look a bit like a swollen Cabbage
Patch Doll.
After the eulogies and prayers and singing and people falling over the coffin
and crying whether they wanted to or not, we drove out to a little cemetery in
the woods and the coffin was unloaded from an ancient black hearse with a
sticker on the back bumper that readBINGO FOR GOD .
Underneath a striped tent, with the hot wind blowing, we stood next to an
open grave and the ceremony went on. There was a kind of thespian quality
about the whole thing. The only one who seemed to be truly upset was Leonard.
He wasn’t saying anything, and he’s too macho to cry in public, but I knew
him. I saw the way his hands shook, the tilt of his mouth, the hooding of his
eyes.
“It’s a nice enough place to get put down,” I whispered to Leonard.
“You’re dead, you’re dead,” Leonard said. “You told me that. It’s a thing
takes the edge off how you feel about your surroundings.”
“Right. Fuck Uncle Chester. Let’s talk fashion. You’ll note no one else here
looks like a black fag Roy Rogers but you.”
That got a smile out of him.
During the preacher’s generic marathon tribute to Uncle Chester, I spent some
time looking at a pretty black woman in a short, tight black dress standing
near us. She, like Leonard, was one of the few not trying out for the Academy
Awards. She didn’t look particularly sad, but she was solemn. Now and then she
turned and looked at Leonard. I couldn’t tell if he noticed. A heterosexual
would have noticed if there was anything romantic in her attitude or not. It
can’t be helped. A heterosexual dick senses a pretty woman, no matter what the
cultural and social training of its owner, and it’ll always point true north.
Or maybe it’s south, now that I think about it.
The preacher finished up a prayer slightly longer than the complete set of
theEncyclopedia Britannica and signaled to lower the coffin.
A long lean guy with his hand on the device that lowers the coffin pushed the
lever and the coffin started down, wobbled, righted itself. Someone in the
audience let out a sob and went quiet. A woman in front of me, wearing a hat
with everything on it but fresh fruit and a strand of barbed wire, shook and
let out a wail and waved a hanky.
A moment later it was all over except for the grave diggers throwing dirt in
the hole.
There was some hand-shaking and talking, and most of the crowd came over and
spoke to Leonard and said how sorry they were, looked at me out of the corners
of their eyes, suspicious because I was white, or maybe because they assumed I
was Leonard’s lover. It was bad enough they had a relative or acquaintance who
was queer, but shit, looked like he was fucking a white guy.
We were invited, not with great enthusiasm, to a gathering of friends and
family, but Leonard passed, and the crowd faded out. The pretty woman in black
came over and smiled at Leonard and shook his hand and said she was sorry.
“I’m Florida Grange. I was your uncle’s lawyer, Mr. Pine,” she said. “Guess I
still am. You’re in the will. I’ll make it official if you’ll come by my
office tomorrow. Here’s my card. And here’s the key to his house. You get that
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and some money.”
Leonard took the key and card and stood there looking stunned. I said,
“Hello, Miss Grange, my name’s Hap Collins.”
“Hello,” she said, and shook my hand.
“You know my uncle well?” Leonard asked.
“No. Not really,” Florida Grange said, and she went away, and so did we.
3.
Uncle Chester’s house was in that part of LaBorde called the black section of
town by some, nigger town by others, and the East Side by all the rest.
It was a run-down section that ten years ago had been in pretty good shape
because it was on the edge of the white community before the white community
moved farther west and the streets were abandoned here in favor of putting
maintenance where the real money and power were, amongst the fat-cat honkies.
We drove down Comanche Street and bounced in some potholes deep enough a
parachute would have been appropriate, and Leonard pulled up in a driveway
spotted with pea gravel and several days’ worth of newspapers.
The house in front of the drive was one story, but large and formerly fine,
gone to seed with peeling paint and a roof that had been cheaply repaired with
tin and tar. The tin patches caught the sunlight and played hot beams over it
and reflected them back against the crumbly bricks of a chimney and the limbs
of a great oak that hung over one side of the roof and scratched it and gave
the yard below an umbrella of dark shade. There was more tin around the bottom
of the house, concealing a crawlspace.
A ten-foot, wisteria-covered post was driven in the ground on the other side
of the house, and sticking out from the post were long nails, and the mouths
of beer and soft drink bottles engulfed the nails, and many of the bottles
looked to have been shot apart or banged apart by rocks and clubs. Glass was
heaped at the bottom of the pole like discarded costume jewelry.
I’d seen a rig like that years ago in the yard of an old black carpenter. I
didn’t know what it was then, and I didn’t know what it was now. All I could
think to call it was a bottle tree.
Front of the long porch some hedges grew wild and ungroomed, like
old-fashioned, Afro-style haircuts, and between the hedges some slanting stone
steps met the graying boards of the porch, and standing on the boards were two
black men and a young black boy.
Before we got out of the car, I said, “Relatives of yours?”
“Not that I recognize,” Leonard said.
We got out and walked up to the porch. The boy looked at us, but the men
hardly noticed. The kid popped a thin rubber hose off his arm and tossed it
aside, started rubbing his arm. The boy appeared confused but pleasant, as if
awakening from a long, relaxed sleep.
One of the black men, a tall, muscular guy in T-shirt and slacks with a wedge
of hair cut like a thin Mohawk and a hypodermic needle in his hand, said to
the boy, “More candy where that come from, you got the price.”
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The boy went down the steps, between me and Leonard and out into the street.
Mohawk dropped the needle onto the porch. There were a couple other needles
there, along with the rubber hose.
The other black guy was wearing a light blue shower cap an orange T-shirt and
jeans, and was about the size of a Rose Parade float. He looked down from the
porch at us like it tired him out. He said to Leonard, “Shit, if you ain’t the
fucking bird of paradise.”
“And propped on a stick,” said Mohawk. “Who dresses you, brother? And you,
white boy. You preachin’ somewhere?”
“I’m selling insurance,” I said. “You want some? Got a feeling you might need
a little, come a few minutes.”
Mohawk smiled at me like I was one funny guy.
“What are you doing here?” Leonard asked.
“We’re standing on the motherfucking porch,” Parade Float said. “Whatchoo
doin’ here?”
“I own the place.”
“Ah,” said Mohawk. “You must be that nutty Uncle Tom’s boy?”
“I’m Chester Pine’s nephew, that’s what you mean.”
“Well, hey, we was just doing a little business,” said Mohawk. “Don’t let
your balls swell up.”
“This ain’t your office,” Leonard said.
Mohawk smiled. “You know, you’re right, but we was thinking of making it kind
of an extension.” He came out to the edge of the porch and pointed next door.
“We live over there. That’s our main office, Captain Sunshine.”
I looked. It was a large run-down house on the lot next to Chester’s place. A
number of young black men came out on the long porch, stood and stared.
“That wasn’t any measles vaccination you gave that kid,” Leonard said. “How
old was he? Twelve?”
“Don’t know,” said Parade Float. “We don’t send him no birthday presents.
Shit, all you know, we’re free-lance doctors.”
“I think you’re free-lance assholes,” Leonard said.
“Fuck you,” Parade Float said.
“Do-gooders,” Mohawk said. “Like in the movies. That’s what you fucks are.
Right?”
Leonard gave Mohawk a studied look. “Get off my property. Now. Otherwise,
your friends next door’ll be wiping you out of your big friend’s ass here.
Provided they can get what’s left of him out of that shower cap.”
“Fuck you,” Parade Float said.
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“I was wondering about that cap,” I said. “You leave the water running? Go
looking for a towel?”
“Fuck you,” Parade Float said again.
“You run out of your daily word allotment,” I said, “how you gonna beg us for
mercy?”
“Wooo,” Mohawk said. “This little talk could lead to something.”
“Don’t make me happy prematurely,” Leonard said.
And then Leonard moved. His cane went out between Mohawk’s legs, and he
popped it forward, locking one of Mohawk’s knees, and the move tossed Mohawk
face-forward off the porch.
Leonard stepped aside and Mohawk hit the ground on his head. Sounded like it
hurt.
That was my cue. As Parade Float stepped off the porch to get involved, I
shot out a side kick and hit him on his stepping leg, square on the kneecap.
He came down on his head too. He got both hands under him, started to rise,
and I kicked him in the throat with about a third of what I had.
He rolled over on his back holding his throat, gurgling. The shower cap
stayed in place. I never realized how tight those little buddies fit. Maybe it
was just the light blue ones.
Leonard had Mohawk up now and had dropped his cane and was working Mohawk
with a series of lefts and rights and knee lifts, and he wouldn’t let him
fall. Mohawk’s body was jumping all over the yard, like he had a pogo stick up
his ass.
“That’s enough, Leonard,” I said. “Your knuckles will swell.”
Leonard hit Mohawk a couple more under the short ribs and didn’t move in
close enough to support him this time. Mohawk crumpled on the grass, made a
noise like gas escaping.
Parade Float had gotten to his knees. He was still holding his throat,
sputtering. I checked out the folks on the porch next door. They were just
standing there. In tough postures, of course.
Leonard yelled at them. “You retards want some, come on over.”
Nobody wanted any. Which made me happy. I didn’t want to tear up my brand new
J. C. Penney’s suit.
Leonard picked up his cane and looked at Parade Float, said, “I see you or
your buddy here again, even see someone reminds me of you two, we’re gonna
kill you.”
“Couldn’t we just mess up their hair instead?” I said.
“No,” Leonard said. “I want to kill them.”
“There you are, guys,” I said. “Death or nothing.”
Mohawk had casually crawled to the edge of the yard near the bottle tree and
was trying to get up. Parade Float had it together enough now that he could
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get up and go over and help Mohawk to his feet. They limped and wheezed toward
the house next door.
A tall black man on the porch over there yelled, “Your times are comin’, you
two. It’s comin’.”
“Nice meeting you, neighbors,” Leonard said, and he got out his key and we
went inside.
4.
The house was hot and filthy, the fireplace was full of trash, and there were
great skeins of cobwebs all about. As we moved, dust puffed and floated in the
sunlight that bled through thickly curtained windows and the place smelled
sour and the smell came from a variety of things. One of them I felt certain
was Uncle Chester himself. You die in a house and lay there for two days in
the heat, you get a little ripe, and so do your surroundings.
I left the front door open. Not that it helped much. There wasn’t any wind
stirring.
“Damn,” Leonard said. “It’s like he didn’t live here.”
Considering the aroma he’d left behind, I felt that was debatable, but I
said, “He was old, Leonard. Maybe he didn’t move around much.”
“He wasn’t that old.”
“You hadn’t seen or heard from him in years. He could have been in a bad
way.”
“Maybe him giving me this place was some kind of final jab in the heart. I
loved this house when I was a kid. He knew that. Shit, look at it now.”
“Final days he maybe got his shit together. Decided to let bygones be
bygones. Ms. Grange said he left you some money too.”
“Confederate, most likely.”
We moved on through the house. The kitchen was squalid with dirty dishes
stacked in the sink and paper plates and TV dinner receptacles stuffed in the
trash can. There was a pile of debris around the can, as if Chester had
finally given up taking out the garbage and had started merely throwing stuff
in that general direction.
Flies buzzed on patrol. On the counter, in a TV dinner tray, squirming in
something green and fuzzy that might have been a partial enchilada, were
maggots.
“Well,” I said. “He damn sure lived in here.”
“Shit,” Leonard said. “This ain’t no recent mess.”
“No. He worked on this one.”
Off the kitchen was a bedroom. We went in there. It was relatively neat. On
the nightstand by the bed was a worn hardback copy of Thoreau’sWalden. That
was Leonard’s favorite book, especially the chapter titled “Self Reliance.”
I looked around the room. One wall was mostly bookshelf. The books were
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behind sliding glass.
Leonard went over to the closed curtain and opened it. The window glass was
dusty yellow and tracked with fly specks. The frame had bars mounted on the
outside of it, and you could see the house where Mohawk, Parade Float, and the
assholes stayed.
“Old man was scared,” I said.
“He wasn’t never scared of nothing,” Leonard said.
“You get older, you got to get scared. Courage is in proportion to your size
and physical condition and what caliber weapon you carry. Some cases how much
liquor, crack, or heroin you got in you.”
“Man, this neighborhood hadn’t never been ritzy, but it’s really gone to the
fucking dogs.”
“Dogs wouldn’t have it.”
“This shit next door. I don’t get it. Crack house and anyone with a glass eye
in their head could tell that’s what it is, but what’re the cops doing? Kid
was getting a jolt of horse on the porch, man. Right out in front of God and
everybody.”
“That’s probably a free jolt,” I said. “Horse doesn’t come cheap. Later on,
they get him needing a little, they’ll tell him to try some rock. He takes
that and he comes back ’cause it’s got him and it’s cheap. A kid can get rock
for five dollars, even if he’s got to steal trinkets to sell.”
Leonard closed the curtain and we went out into the hallway and past the
bathroom into the room next door.
“Jesus,” Leonard said.
The room was full of ceiling-high stacks of yellowed newspapers. There was a
little path between the stuff. We went down that, and the path turned left and
opened up. There was a chair and table in the opening with a small rotating
fan and papers on it.
If you sat in the chair and looked across the table, you could see the window
opposite it, and provided the curtains hadn’t been drawn shut, I figured I’d
have been able to see bars and a dusty view of the crack house.
There was a ballpoint pen and a composition notebook on the desk. The
notebook was open and I looked at the page. Uncle Chester had been doodling.
There were a number of little rectangles and the rectangles were numbered.
There were some lines drawn at the top and bottom and on the sides.
It looked as if Uncle Chester hadn’t had enough to do.
It was hot in there and the dust we’d stirred hung about in the dead air and
around our heads like a veil. It choked me.
We went out of there and back into the living room, started out the front
door to get some air, and that’s when we noticed that besides the lock the key
worked, there were no fewer than five locks or barricades on the door frame,
you wanted to use them. There were two chain locks, a dead bolt, and a metal
bar that fit into slots on either side of the door, and at the bottom and top
of the door were swivel catches.
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“He wasn’t fucking around on security,” I said.
“The assholes next door, I reckon,” Leonard said.
We stood on the porch and the air was still not moving and it was still hot,
but it was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the decaying air inside the
house. Another couple of hours, the temperature would be down to ninety and
the wind might be stirring, and inside the house, you had all the windows open
and a fan going, you might be able to breathe without a respirator.
I looked over at the crack house. No one was visible. I said, “You did all
right for a fella on a cane.”
“Motherfuckers are lucky I can’t get around good as usual. Another week, I’ll
be taking a dance class.”
“That post with the bottles. What the hell is it? Ornamentation?”
“It’s mojo shit. Protects you from evil spirits. Spirits supposed to go into
the bottles and get trapped. Or maybe they go in and are tossed out and
transformed into something safe. Don’t know for sure. I remember seeing them
now and then as a kid. Hearing about them. But Uncle Chester, he never
believed in that shit. He was always practical as a hangman.”
“There’s things about people you never know, Leonard. Even people close as
you and me. Hell, I might listen to polka records, all you know.”
“Reckon so. Listen here, Hap. I got to see that lawyer tomorrow. Think I
could get you to stay with me here tonight?”
“If I don’t want to?”
“Long walk home.”
“What I figured.”
* * *
Though we hadn’t planned on staying, we had brought a change of clothes with
us, in anticipation of stopping somewhere to shed our suits so we could maybe
get a bite to eat and go to a movie.
We put on the clothes and set about tidying the place up some. I drove into
town proper and bought some plastic trash bags and some cleaning stuff, and
when I got back, Leonard had started washing dishes in the sink.
While he did that, I pulled back all the curtains and opened all the windows
and picked up the trash and bagged it and took it out to the side of the
house.
Time I got that done, Leonard had finished the dishes and was doing general
cleaning. Sweeping, mopping, beating down cobwebs with a broom, polishing the
window bars, spraying Lysol about.
“There’s roaches in here big enough to own property,” Leonard said.
“I know. One just helped me carry the trash out.”
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Time we finished what we were willing to do, we were sweaty and dusty, and we
took turns in the bathroom, washing up best we could. There wasn’t any hot
water.
We turned on the porch light and closed the windows and locked up the joint
and stuffed the trunk and backseat with garbage bags and drove off. We put the
garbage in a university dumpster when no one was looking, and went to a Burger
King and ate. We went to a movie after that and came back to the house solid
dark, watching to see if any of our friends next door were waiting to surprise
us.
Guess they were still mulling over the ass kicking earlier that day. We could
see a knot full of them out on the dark front porch over there, looking at us.
We picked up the newspapers in the driveway and waved at our crack house
buddies and went on in the house.
Leonard gave me the bedroom and took the couch in the living room. We laid
about and read newspapers for a while, then sacked out. I left the bedroom
door open to keep air circulating and I raised the window and turned on the
overhead fan.
From where I lay, I could turn and look out the doorway and see Leonard lying
in there on his back on the couch, his arm thrown over his eyes.
“I’m sorry about your uncle,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Everybody has to go.”
“Yeah. I wish things had worked out better between us.”
“He loved you, Leonard. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left you the house.”
“I’d have liked for him to have told me he loved me. Sometimes, when I’m
stupid, I feel guilty for being homosexual. Like I had some choice in how my
hormones got put together. Uncle Chester found out, he treated me like I was a
pervert. Like being gay means you molest children or take advantage of weaker
men for sex.”
“He wasn’t any different than a lot of folks, Leonard.”
“I’ve never forced anything on anyone else, and mostly I don’t bother with
sex at all. I got the problem of being attracted mostly to straight men and
that doesn’t work. Lot of gay guys act gay and that bothers me.”
“That’s odd, Leonard.”
“No, that’s pretty standard with a lot of gays. I think somewhat like a
woman, I guess. I want to have a relationship with a man, but somehow, gay
guys don’t normally do much for me. I guess I’ve been taught they’re odd, and
I’m one of them. Go figure. I tell you, nature played a fucking joke on me.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“Hap, you ever feel funny being my friend, knowing I’m gay?”
“I don’t normally think about it. I mean, you’re not exactly a gay
prototype.”
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“No one is.”
“I mean, I’m not aware of it much, and when I am, I guess it strikes me odd.
I accept it, but don’t understand it. I don’t see gays as perverts. Some are,
some aren’t, same as heterosexuals. But I am an East Texas boy and my
background is Baptist—”
“I’m East Texas and Baptist background too.”
“I know. I’m just saying. Sometimes, I am aware of it. It doesn’t bother me
exactly, but I’m aware of it and I feel a little confused.”
“Thinkyou’re confused. Life would be easier, I was straight.”
“Yep, but you ain’t.”
“Damn. Wish I’d thought of that.”
“You ever watchLeave It to Beaver? ”
“Yeah.”
“End of that show, way I remember it anyway, the two brothers, Wally and the
Beaver, they used to share a room and have a talk before they turned out the
light and went to bed. In that talk they summed up the episode you just
watched, and the problems they’d gone through, and everything was capped off
and solved in those last few minutes and they moved onto new stuff next week
with no baggage. You know what?”
“What?”
“Life ain’t like that.”
“No, it ain’t. Good night, Wally.”
“Good night, Beave.”
5.
Next morning Leonard called and made an appointment with Florida Grange and
we drove over there.
Uptown or not, her building was in the cheap section, right next to a
burned-out apartment complex on a red clay hill that had a highway cut through
it. The apartment complex had burned down three years back and had yet to be
rebuilt, and the clay on which it lay had started to shift toward the highway.
We entered her building and rode the elevator upstairs and saw a middle-aged
woman exit a door holding her jaw. We passed the office she had come out of.
It was the office of a dentist named Mallory. Florida Grange, Attorney at Law,
was between it and a bail bond office.
We went in. No secretary. No lobby. The room was about the size of the men’s
restroom at the YMCA and it was mostly taken up with desk and chairs and file
cabinets and a word processor. On the wall were framed degrees and
certificates that vouched for Florida Grange’s professional abilities.
Florida Grange was sitting behind her desk. She smiled when we came in and
stood up and extended her hand, first to Leonard, then to me. When I shook it,
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the two large silver bracelets on her wrist rattled together.
She was wearing a short snow-white dress that made her chocolate skin and
long kinky black hair radiant. I figured her for thirty years old, maybe
thirty-five at the outside. Sweet chocolate in a smooth white wrapper.
I felt a bit self-conscious being there with her, wearing the clothes I’d
slept in. I had brushed my teeth with some of Uncle Chester’s toothpaste and
my forefinger.
We took seats and Florida Grange sat back behind the desk and picked up a
folder and said, “This is simple and won’t take long. But it is a private
matter, Mr. Pine.”
She smiled at me when she said that, just to make sure I didn’t break out
crying.
“Me and Hap ain’t that private. Nothing you got to say he can’t hear. You
already said I get the house and some money. There anything else?”
“It’s a matter of how much . . . You’re right, Mr. Pine. I’m being
melodramatic.”
“Leonard. I don’t like to be called Mr. Pine. Call him Hap.”
“Very well, Leonard. It’s not a complicated will, so I’m going to forgo all
the formality, if you don’t mind?”
“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “I live for formality. I don’t get some of it,
I might get depressed.”
She smiled at him. I wished she’d smile at me that way. “He left you the
house and some money. One hundred thousand dollars.”
Maybe that’s why she didn’t smile at me the same way. I didn’t have one
hundred thousand dollars.
“Where in hell did he get money like that?” Leonard said. “He was a security
guard when he was working.”
She shrugged. “If he’d been saving a while, that’s not that unusual. Perhaps
he had some bonds come due. Whatever, you inherited that much money. I’ll
arrange for you to receive it. One last thing, he left you this envelope and
its contents.”
She opened her desk drawer and removed a thick manila envelope. She handed it
to Leonard. He opened it and peeked inside. He gave it to me. I peeked inside.
There were a lot of newspaper clippings in there. I saw that one was a coupon
for a dollar off a pizza. Good. We liked pizza.
I shook the envelope. Something heavy moved inside. I held the envelope so
that whatever it was slid out through the clippings and into my palm.
It was a key. I gave it to Leonard.
“Looks like a safety-deposit box,” he said.
“My thoughts exactly,” I said.
“Goddamn, Doc!” came a clear voice through the wall.
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Florida Grange, Attorney at Law, looked embarrassed, said, “I don’t think
he’s a very good dentist. People yell a lot.”
“That’s all right,” Leonard said. “We don’t plan to use him.”
“I keep planning to move,” she said.
Leonard said, “Which was Uncle Chester’s bank, you know?”
“Certainly. LaBorde, Main and North.”
Leonard nodded, put the key back in the envelope. “You said you didn’t know
him, but you’re his lawyer. You talked to him. You must have got some kind of
impression.”
“I met him about a month ago,” she said. “He came to me and wanted me to
handle his affairs.”
“Did he seem sick?” Leonard asked.
“He seemed stressed. Like he was having some troubles. He thought he had
Alzheimer’s. He said that much.”
“And did he?”
“I don’t know. But he thought he did. He wanted to square things up in case
his mind was going or his time was up. That’s the way he expressed it.”
“What I’m really asking is, did he say anything about me, other than what I
inherited?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Leonard said, but I could tell it wasn’t all right.
“I guess you know this, he shot a number of people a few months back. Or so
the story goes.”
“What?”
“I don’t mean he killed anyone. I heard about it through the grapevine. I’m
originally from that part of town. Where your uncle lived. My mama still lives
there. Seems your uncle had some trouble with the people next door. Supposed
to be a crack house.”
“It is,” Leonard said.
“Someone over there was playing around, shot some bottles off a post in his
yard. I suppose they were talking about a bottle tree.”
“They were,” Leonard said.
“Your uncle was on his porch when it happened and a shot almost hit him he
said, so he got his shotgun and went over there and shot some men on the
porch. He had rat shot in the gun. Way it worked out, the police showed up and
he got hauled in and the men went to the hospital to get the shot picked out.
Your uncle was let go, and far as I know, it wasn’t even in the papers.”
“Happened in nigger town is why,” Leonard said. “Bunch of niggers popping one
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another isn’t news to the peckerwoods. They expect it.”
“I suppose,” Florida Grange said. “Anyway, that’s something I can tell you
about him, but that’s about all.”
I could tell Leonard was secretly pleased. It fit his memory of his Uncle
Chester. Strong and upright, didn’t take shit from anyone.
Grange had him fill out some papers and gave him some to take with him. By
the time they were finished, the dentist drill had begun to whine.
“I’m sorry,” Florida Grange said. “Let’s go out in the hall.”
We went. Leonard said, “I guess I don’t really have anything else to ask,
Miss Grange. Sorry I pulled you out here.”
“I’m tired of the drill anyway,” she said. “And if you’re going by Leonard,
call me Florida.”
“OK, Florida. Thanks.”
“You have any other questions, give me a call,” she said.
“Is it OK I ask a question?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Anyone significant in your life right now?”
“Not really.”
“Any possibility of me taking you to dinner?”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Collins.”
“I clean up pretty good.”
“I’m sure you do, but I think not. Thanks for asking.”
* * *
On the way down in the elevator, Leonard said, “Hap Collins, Lady Killer.”
6.
In the car, while Leonard drove, I looked through the contents of the
envelope.
“Anything there mean anything?” Leonard asked.
“Got a bunch of pizza coupons. Some for Burger King. And you get real hungry,
we can buy one dinner, get one free at Lupe’s Mexican Restaurant.”
“That’s it? Coupons?”
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“Yep.”
“Christ, he must have been losing it.”
“I don’t know. Coupons save lots of money. I use them. I figured up once I’d
saved enough on what I’d normally have spent on stuff to buy a used television
set.”
“Color?”
“Black and white. But I bought some Diet Pepsi and pork skins instead.”
“Coupons seem a strange thing for Uncle Chester to give to a lawyer to hold
for me. He could have left that stuff on the kitchen table.”
“Maybe he wasn’t thinking correctly. Coupons could have taken on valuable
import. And the key was with them.”
“Goes to a bank safety-deposit box, I figure.”
“You said that, Sherlock.”
“We’ll check it out right now.”
“Leonard?”
“Yeah.”
“These coupons, I just noticed, they’re a couple years expired.”
* * *
Inside the LaBorde Main-and-North First National Bank, I took a chair and
Leonard spoke to a clerk. The clerk sent him to a gray-haired lady at a desk.
Leonard leaned on his cane and showed her the key and some of the papers
Florida Grange had given him. The lady nodded, gave him back the key, got up,
and walked him to a barred doorway. A guard inside the bars was signaled. He
opened the door and Leonard went inside and the guard locked it behind him. A
few moments later, Leonard was let out carrying a large manila envelope and a
larger parcel wrapped in brown paper and twine.
“You’ll love this,” he said, and held up the envelope. “Inside’s a paperback
copy ofDracula and a fistful of newspaper clippings, and guess what? Another
key. There’s not a clue what it goes to. Uncle Chester’s brain must have got
so he didn’t know his nuts from a couple acorns.”
“What about that?” I said, indicating the larger parcel.
“I opened it already.”
“I can tell that by the way the twine is rewrapped. What is it?”
Leonard was hesitant. “Well . . .” He took it over to one of the tables and
untied the twine and unwrapped the package. It was a painting. A good
painting. It was shadowy and showed a weathered two-story gothic-style house
surrounded by trees; fact was, the trees grew so thick they seemed to imprison
the house.
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“Your uncle do this?”
“I did. When I was sixteen.”
“No joke?”
“No joke. I used to want to paint. I did this for Uncle Chester’s birthday.
Maybe he’s giving it back to me now, letting me know things aren’t really
forgiven.”
“He’s certainly giving you other things. Money. The house.”
“Coupons and a copy ofDracula. ”
“That’s right. Is that all there was? Nothing else?”
“Nothing, besides the fact you’re right. There’s the house and I’m gonna get
one hundred thousand dollars and you aren’t.”
* * *
So, I thought Leonard was gonna be richer, and that would be all right, and
we’d go back to normal, except for him not working in the rose fields, and me,
I’d be heading on back to the house and back to the fields, provided I could
get my old job again, or another just like it, and Leonard, he’d be putting
his uncle’s place up for sale and living off that and his inheritance, maybe
put the dough into some kind of business.
I was sad for Leonard in one way, losing a loved one, but in another, that
Uncle Chester was a sonofabitch far as I was concerned, way he treated
Leonard, and I was glad Leonard had gotten some money and a house to sell, and
a secret part of me was glad the old sonofabitch was dead and buried and out
of sight.
So, that afternoon after seeing the pretty lawyer who wouldn’t go out with
me, Leonard drove me home and dropped me off and went away. I figured he was
at his place, his feet propped up, listening to Dwight Yoakam or Hank Williams
or Patsy Cline, smoking his pipe full of cherrytinted tobacco, perhaps reading
his uncle’s copy ofDracula or contemplating his loss and gain, wondering what
he’d end up doing with his money.
In the long run, except for the fact he was gonna wither and die like
everybody else ever born, I figured things for him were going to be fine as
things can get fine.
But I hadn’t counted on the black cloud of fate.
7.
The black cloud of fate came with rain, of course.
Two days later, early afternoon, I was sitting on my front porch taking in
the cool wind and the view. One moment there was just the same red, empty road
that runs by Leonard’s place, and beyond it, great pines and oaks and twists
of vines, and above it all, clouds as white and smooth as God’s own whiskers,
and the next moment, the wind abruptly changed direction, blew harder from the
north, turned damp and sticky, and the clouds began to roll and churn and go
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gray at the edges. Out of the north rolled darker clouds yet, and they filled
the sky and gave up their rain and the pines became purple with shadow and the
road turned from red to blood-clot brown, then darker. The rain slammed down
hard, and the wind thrashed it onto the porch in steel-colored needles that
stung my face and filled my nostrils with the aroma of wet earth.
I got out of my old wooden rocking chair and went into the house, feeling
blue and broke and missing Leonard.
I hadn’t heard from him since he’d dropped me off, and I’d called his place a
couple times and only got rings. I wondered if he’d finally gotten his money.
I wondered if he were spending it. It wasn’t like me and him to go more than a
couple of days without touching base with one another, just in case we needed
to argue about something.
I thought I’d call him again, maybe drive over there after the rain, see if
his phone might not be working, but about then the phone rang and I answered
it.
It was my former boss, Lacy, the Old Bastard. He sounded friendly. A warning
flag went up. I figured whoever had taken my place in the fields had gotten a
better job bouncing drunks or shoveling shit, or maybe died of stroke or
snakebite, or taken up preaching, which was a pretty good career, you had the
guts not to be ashamed of it.
“How’s it hanging, Hap?”
“To the left.”
“Hey, that’s my good side. Nut over there’s bigger. You ready to come back to
work?”
“Don’t tell me you’re calling from the field?”
He forced a laugh. “Nah, we had a down day.”
That meant either no one showed up, or certain supplies couldn’t be
coordinated, or they’d expected the rain.
“That little thing the other day,” he said. “Let’s let it go. I won’t even
dock you. Tomorrow we got to have a good day, losing this one. So, hell, Hap.
I can use you.”
“Man or woman’s got hands and isn’t in a wheelchair, you can use them.”
“Hey, I’m offering you a job. I didn’t call up for insults.”
“Maybe we can jump that shit pay a little. Another fifty cents an hour you’d
almost be in line with minimum wage.”
“Don’t start, Hap. You know the pay. I pay cash, too. You save on income tax
that way.”
“You save on income tax, Lacy. Wages like that, I don’t save dick. I’d rather
make enough so I had to pay some taxes.”
“Yeah, well . . .” And he went on to tell me about his old mother in a Kansas
nursing home. How he had to send her money every month. I figured he probably
shot his mother years ago, buried her under a rosebush to save on fertilizer.
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“Couldn’t your old mother whore a little?” I said. “You know, she’s set up.
Got a room and a bed and all. If she can spread her legs, she can pay her
way.”
“Hap, you bastard. Don’t start fucking with me, or you can forget the job.”
“My heart just missed a beat.”
“Listen here, let’s quit while you’re ahead. You come on in and I’ll get you
working. Tell the nigger to come on in when he’s ready.”
“Shall I tell Leonard you called him a nigger?”
“Slipped on that. Force of habit.”
“Bad habit.”
“You won’t tell him I said it, all right? You know how he is.”
“How is he?”
“You know. Like that time in the field, when him and that other nig—colored
fella with the knife got into it.”
“That guy ever get out of the hospital?”
“Think he’s in some kind of home now. I’m surprised Leonard didn’t do some
time for that. You won’t tell him about the ‘nigger’ business, will you?”
“I did tell him, there’s one good thing about it.”
“Yeah?”
“You already got the roses for your funeral.”
He rang off and I had the fifty-cent raise for me and Leonard both, just like
I thought Leonard might actually go back to it.
Frankly, I had a hard time seeing me going back to it, but a look at the
contents of my refrigerator and a peek at the dough in the cookie jar made me
realize I had to.
My mood moved from blue to black, and I was concentrating on the failures of
my life, finding there were quite a few, wondering what would happen ten years
from now when I was in my midfifties.
What did I do then?
Rose-field work still?
What else did I know?
What was I qualified for?
I wasn’t able to tally up a lot of options, though I spent considerable time
with the effort.
I was considering a career in maybe aluminum siding or, the devil help me,
insurance, when the phone rang.
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It was Leonard.
“Goddamn, man,” I said. “I been wondering about you. I called your place and
no answer. I was beginning to think you’d had an accident. Refrigerator was
lying on top of you or something.”
“I didn’t go back home,” Leonard said. “Not to stay anyway. I packed some of
my stuff and came back here to Uncle Chester’s.”
“You calling from there?”
“His phone got pulled from lack of payment. Months ago. I’m calling from a
pay phone. You want to know what I’m wearing?”
“Not unless you think it’ll really get me excited.”
“I’m afraid clothes have to have women in them for you to get excited.”
“Maybe you could talk in a high voice.”
“Cut through the shit, Hap. I’m gonna live at Uncle Chester’s awhile. I been
going through his stuff. I feel like I want to do that, get in touch with who
he was. And more importantly, find out what this fucking key goes to.”
“His main coupon collection.”
“Could be. I’ve looked everywhere. I got other reasons too. I want to fix the
house up some. Maybe sell it for more than I can get now.”
“Sounds smart, Leonard. Things are swinging here too. I got my old job in the
rose fields back.”
“Lose it again.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Hey, you toted me some, move over here a bit, least till I do what I got to
do, and I’ll keep you fed and in toilet paper.”
“I don’t know. That’s more charity than I like. I don’t even have a bum leg.”
“Me neither. Hardly. I’ve been moving around some without the cane. Mostly
without it. I don’t plan to pick it up again, I can do without it. Look, Hap.
It ain’t charity. You can help me fix the place up.”
“What I can’t fix, which is nothing, I shit on. You know that.”
“You can tote a hammer, hand me nails. And there’s something else. These
fucks next door. I got no problems with them yet, but I feel one brewing, way
they watch me. They’re biding their time. I’d like to have you at my back, and
there’s always the chance they’ll get you first, instead of me. I like the
idea of a buffer.”
“Well, I can see that.”
“Good. Can I count on you?”
I considered working for Lacy again. I thought of the rose fields, the heat,
the sticks, the dynamic pay.
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“What the hell do you think?” I said.
8.
The real repairs and cleaning began in earnest.
I went to live with him in Uncle Chester’s house the next day, and he got the
bed from then on and I got the couch. During the days we did repairs, or
rather Leonard did. I walked around with a hammer and nails and fetched
things, hummed and sang to myself. I do some pretty good spirituals. Leonard
said that’s the way it ought be, a black man with a honkie servant could sing
a little gospel.
We spent a lot of time on the roof, taking off the old tin and putting down
some real roofing. I trimmed the big oak that was scratching the roof all by
my ownself, managed to saw off the offending limbs without sawing through a
finger or busting my ass on the ground.
It was hot as hell up there and the glare was bad enough you had to wear
sunglasses while you worked. I began to tan and lose weight, and I liked the
feeling so much I gave up beer and excessive numbers of tacos.
When I wasn’t holding down roofing for Leonard to hammer, wasn’t fetching
something, I’d look off at the crack house and wonder who was inside. People
came and went there pretty brisk come late afternoon, and right on through
until morning. Come full day, things got quiet. Selling crack wore you out,
you had to get some rest before the next tide came in.
Whole thing depressed me, seeing kids and adults, and even babies on the hips
of female druggies a couple years into having their period, lining up over
there like it was a cafeteria.
I saw a couple of cop cars during that time, and there was even a bust and
some folks were hauled in. In fact, it was Leonard made the call, but the next
day, same guys that left the house were back. One of them was Mohawk, the
other was Parade Float. Great strides in my understanding of our judicial
system were made without leaving the house and yard.
Way it worked was simple. I’d had it all wrong. You broke the law you didn’t
have to really suffer. See, a guy sold drugs to kids or anyone else, they
could come get you, they could lock you up, but come morning, you knew
somebody, had some money, a good lawyer, a relationship with the bail
bondsman, you could go home, get a free ride back to your house. Have some
rest, a Dr. Pepper and a couple of Twinkies to lift your spirit, and you were
in business again, if come nightfall you had the supplies.
It was depressing, and the folks next door must have known we felt that way,
’cause they liked to hang out on their front porch come dark and stare at us.
We could see them over there beneath their little yellow porch light,
congregating like the bugs that swarmed the bulb above them.
And their light and our porch light, when we used it, was about all the light
there was for Comanche Street, because the street lights had long been shot
out and no one had come to replace them. If they had, the crack house people
would have shot them out again. The only beacon they wanted on the street was
their beacon, one that called people to their place to buy something to make
them spin and float, help them coast through another few hours.
There were a couple houses across from us, but they kept their porch lights
off, and what lights they burned were filmy behind curtains, looked like
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lights seen from a distance and underwater. Decent folks on Comanche Street
didn’t come out of their houses at night, lest they encounter the dealers or
the druggies themselves, the latter looking for a quick few dollars to
purchase a hunk of rock.
For that matter, during the day you didn’t see folks much. The working people
came and went, but didn’t linger. The kid we had seen on Leonard’s front porch
that day, we began to see more often. He wore a beeper on his hip. Acquired a
cool walk. Had some nice clothes. He looked as if his soul was melting.
The bars and locks on Uncle Chester’s door began to make sense. You didn’t
nail something down in this neighborhood, it’d show up at the pawnshop, and
the money received for it would finance some druggie to do some business.
Got so we left the house, we had the impression we might come back to the
front door off the hinges, rammed in, and all the little goods that Uncle
Chester had left would be gone, except the coupons. Or maybe the shits next
door would start to think they ought to get even with me and Leonard, and we’d
come back to worse: smoke and charred wood.
Considering all that, way we did, was something had to be bought, one of us
nearly always stayed while the other went to get it.
Got so Leonard stayed pissed all the time. Kept his brow furrowed and his
uncle’s shotgun oiled and loaded, and not with rat shot. He made jokes about
how many niggers next door it would take to roof the house, he sliced them
real thin.
We cleaned inside the house, too. Uncle Chester and his odors finally
departed. The flies went in search of deader pastures.
Nights, after a hard day’s work, was when we did our cleaning and searching
for what the key went to. No safe or locked box or locked floor or wall panels
were found. Some of the coupons from the deposit box were good, though. We
used them for eat-outs, one of us running into town to pick up pizza or
burgers.
At night, we worked to the sounds of Leonard’s country music; hillbilly
voices fighting it out with the rap and rock sounds next door, stuff I
sometimes preferred to lost loves and drinking in the barroom, but Leonard, he
used the decibel knob to drown them out. ’Least they were drowned out in Uncle
Chester’s house. I don’t know they noticed next door. Nobody called the law on
either of us. In that neighborhood, somebody wasn’t getting hurt or robbed, a
little loud music didn’t mean much. For all the good the law did down there,
they might as well have just drove near the neighborhood and honked, tossed
out a few Don’t Do Drug leaflets.
Last room we tackled was the one with the newspapers. It was hot in there,
and the little fan managed to stir the dust and make you choke. The roof had
leaked, gotten on the papers and mildewed them, and in some places the water
had soaked through and joined the wood beneath them and rotted out sections of
the floor. We could hear it squeak, feel it sag when we walked.
We decided best thing to do was remove the papers, glance through them
quickly as possible, see if there was anything there really meant anything.
After a couple pickup loads to the recycling center, we quit looking through
the rest, quit thinking they meant anything. Only thing we noticed were gaps
in pages, where Uncle Chester had liberated coupons with scissors.
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All doubts were cast aside. It was pretty clear by then. Uncle Chester had
been off his nut. The key had probably gone to something no longer owned, long
lost to time, but significant somehow in the watery cells that made up Uncle
Chester’s brain.
Leonard put the key away and forgot about it and readDracula. He said he
liked it pretty good and thought it would have scared him more had it not been
for the crack house next door. Look out there and see that happening, it’s
hard for some guy with fangs to scare you much. Guys next door were bigger
vampires: clutch of assholes made you want drugs way a vampire wanted blood.
Made it so you’d do anything to have it. Rob and lie, murder your lovers, take
up astrology and reading cozy mysteries.
After we’d been there about a week, Leonard quit using his cane and replaced
the broken bottles on the bottle tree. I think he was taunting the folks next
door to shoot them out, looking for some excuse to exchange their heads, mix
up their internal organs.
One night he woke me up calling out “You sonsabitches” in his sleep. He was
making me nervous. He kept the shotgun a little too close. I felt things were
coming down on Leonard that were bigger than he was. Somewhere in all this, he
had determined the assholes next door were the cause for Uncle Chester’s
death. And maybe they were. Old Uncle Chester had been everything Leonard knew
about manhood.
Leonard had been raised by his grandmother, but it was his uncle he came to
see summers, and it was his uncle who taught him what it was to be masculine.
Taught him about the woods and guns and carpentry and the appreciation of
books. Encouraged him to make something of his life, gave him backbone. Then,
when Leonard was a young man and realized he was gay and told his uncle, it
had all fallen apart.
But be that as it may, his uncle had formed him, had taken him like dough and
shaped him and baked him and made him who he was, and no matter how I felt
about Uncle Chester’s disowning Leonard, I had to admit, he had done a good
job. Or a job that had held up till now—up until Uncle Chester came back into
Leonard’s life, came back after he was dead like some kind of ghost. And not a
happy one.
* * *
One Saturday afternoon, hot as the blazes, I was up on the roof with my shirt
off, cooking up a skin cancer, considering breaking my ban on ice-cold beer,
and Florida Grange showed up. She was driving a little gray Toyota, and when
she got out of the car I saw she was outfitted in a simple sky-blue dress that
showed lots of leg and happily threatened to show a little more.
She stood in the drive and put a hand over her eyes like an Indian scout and
called up to me. “Leonard here?”
“He’s in town. Went to get some supplies.”
“Oh. Well, I came to visit my mama, thought I’d drop by and see how things
are coming along. And I got another paper for Leonard to sign. I missed it at
the office.”
“One minute.”
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I got my shirt off a sawed oak limb and pulled it on. It was a cotton jean
shirt with the sleeves bobbed short and it felt good and soft against my warm,
sweaty skin. I sucked in my gut while I buttoned it, just in case Florida was
watching. I climbed down by method of the oak.
I dropped out of the tree, wiped my hands on my pants, smiled, and went over
to see her. I stuck out a hand and we shook. She had the same soft hand and
the same rattling bracelets. Her hair was dark and wild, like a storm cloud.
The wind picked up the smell of her perfume and gave it to me. I needed that
like a punch in the teeth.
I caught my reflection in her car windshield. I looked like shit, but my
teeth were clean. I’d brushed with my own toothbrush not long ago, and I’d
even used mouthwash. Progress was being made.
“Would you like something to drink, Miss Grange?”
“Florida?”
“Yeah. That’s right. Florida.”
“Yes. I would like something to drink.”
“I’ll get it. It’d be best to sit out here on the porch. We don’t have
air-conditioning.”
“That’ll be fine.”
“We’ve got Coke. Diet Coke. Ice tea. Beer. We’ve got some nonalcoholic beer
too. Sharp’s. It’s pretty good.”
“I’ll have ice tea. No sugar.”
I went in the house and poured her tea and got myself a Sharp’s. I had
discovered I actually preferred the nonalcoholic beer to the real thing. It
was the taste I liked, not the results.
I carried the tea and Sharp’s onto the porch. Florida was seated in the
glider Leonard and I had installed. I had fastened the bolts to the porch
roof. I hoped I had done a good job. I’d have hated for Florida Grange to bust
her shapely ass.
I gave her the tea and sat down on the other side of the glider and mentally
groped for small talk. I almost said something about the weather but
restrained myself. I tried not to look at her legs, which were bare and smooth
looking. I wondered if they were as soft as her hand.
“You living here?” she asked.
“For now. I’m helping Leonard get the place in shape to sell.”
“I see.”
We sat in silence and sipped our drinks. An old black Chevy chugged along the
street and an elderly black face looked out of it at us, looked away, and
looked back. The driver was trying to determine if any miscegenation was going
on.
It wasn’t, though I was hopeful, in a fantasy sort of way. Actually, seemed
to me, from here on out, I’d have to be content to look at Florida Grange’s
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legs and sneak a look at her panties when she got in or out of her car, way I
used to do with girls when I was in high school.
Thought of that made me feel sort of ill. Guys, they’re some piece of work.
Next thing I knew I’d be putting quarters in filling station restroom rubber
machines, trying to get those special gift items you bought when you really
didn’t need a rubber. The Instant Pussy, a French Tickler that looked like a
plastic squid, and the little book of sex jokes.
Here was an intelligent professional woman, and all I could think about was
how much I’d like to dork her. I had to think about something else. Thing to
do was to talk to her the way you’d talk to any interesting professional in
the law business, male or female.
“You get many whiplash cases?”
“What?”
“You know—”
“Oh. Now and then. I mean, a couple. I mainly do wills, stuff like that.”
That was good, Hap. Real good. Why don’t you just call her an ambulance
chaser?
“Nice day, huh?”
“Yeah. Well . . .”
“I mean, it’s hot, but it’s OK. It’s not as humid as usual. I mean, it’s
usually more humid.”
Florida Grange looked at her watch. “When do you think Leonard will be back?”
“Soon. Hell, Florida. I’m acting like a fool. I get around a beautiful woman
lately, I act like a jackass. I don’t mean to.”
“That’s all right.”
“No. No, it isn’t. If you prefer, I’ll just be real quiet and sit here. . . .
You interested in Leonard?”
She smiled at me. “Leonard’s gay.”
“You knew that? I was hoping to break the news to you, and you’d be so
disappointed, I’d have to do in a pinch. I’m not gay, by the way.”
“Gee. I’d never have guessed. Most everyone around here knows Leonard’s gay.
He spent time here in the summers. My mother knew his uncle and knew Leonard
all the while he was growing up. She told me about him.”
“Ah.”
“Listen, Mr. Collins . . . Hap. I owe you an apology.”
“You owe me one? Way I’ve been ogling you? You got to forgive me, Florida. I
been out in the country too long. No female companionship. I’m almost
completely fueled by adolescent hormones.”
“The other day, when you asked me out, I told you no—”
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“Hey, no problem, that’s your right—”
“Will you shut up a minute?”
“Sure.”
“I got a confession. I didn’t go out with you because you’re white. That’s
it.”
“You don’t like white guys?”
“It’s not that. It’s that I’m as much a product of racism as anyone else. I
don’t really think about it much, don’t think I’m doing it. But, you see, I
feel all that stuff about the white man’s world. How, as a black woman, I have
to battle uphill for everything I get. How it always seems when I get to a
point where I’m ready to advance, there’s some kind of white hurdle.”
“I guess there is.”
“Sometimes there is. Sometimes there isn’t, but I’ve got a chip on my
shoulder just the same, so when a white man asks me out, I get to thinking
he’s thinking, ‘This black bitch will be glad to go out with me. I’m white.
And because I’m white, I can get me some of her nigger ass,’ then Massuh can
go on about his business and hook up with someone white, someone respectable.”
“Well, to be honest, I was thinking about the ‘get me some ass’ part.”
“I know. I can tell. You sort of ooze musk. But it’s the other part. The
racist part. I didn’t really think you were thinking that. Not then, not now.
But conditioning dies hard. I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and I’ve
regretted it, me thinking that, and you see, I knew you were here, ’cause my
mother said she’s seen you here, and she knew you from the funeral, and well,
I wanted you to know, I’m sorry I was racist. Damn, I’m sort of running things
together.”
“That’s all right. I get your drift. It’s very honest of you. It makes me
feel like shit, but it’s honest.”
“Yes, it is. And I still don’t want to go out with you.”
“I see.”
“Know why?”
“I’m ugly?”
“No. Actually I find you attractive, in a gnarly, old-fashioned male sort of
way.”
Gnarly?
“But the problem is I like to dance and white boys have no rhythm. And you
know what else they say about you white boys?”
I watched a beautiful smile spread across her face.
“What do they say?” I asked.
“You’ve got itty-bitty dicks.”
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9.
When Leonard came back, Florida gave him the paper and he signed it and she
took it back. We talked her into returning that night for supper. Leonard
promised to cook spaghetti and sauce, and I promised to make a salad. Leonard
eyed me when I said that, and I said, “Really.”
I tried not to watch too pointedly as Florida climbed into her car. When she
was driving off, Leonard said, “Man, you need to jack off or something. You’re
starting to look at that woman like she’s a chocolate eclair.”
“Yeah, and I’m embarrassed by it too. I can’t help myself. I been alone too
long. I made progress, though. While you were gone we had a polite and
intelligent conversation about the size of white guys’ dicks.”
“Those little things?”
I climbed back on the roof and Leonard came up with me and looked over what I
had done, and was pleased to see he wouldn’t have to redo it.
“You know, you gonna get where you can flush a toilet without instructions,”
Leonard said.
“Yassuh,” I said. “I’s catchin’ on. Ya wants me to sang one them spirituals
now, Massuh Leonard?”
“I want you to shut up.”
We knocked off at five to clean up. Leonard had paid for a tank of butane, so
now there was hot water. When I finished showering with the hot water, I
turned the faucet to pure cold and rinsed in that. By the time I got out of
the shower and dried and was stepping into clean underwear, I was already
sweating and the old boards and wallpaper in the bathroom, damp from moisture
and heat, had taken on the aroma of the ass end of a camel.
I pulled on my jeans and T-shirt and slid my sockless feet into my deck shoes
and went into the kitchen. It smelled good in there, which was a nice change.
Leonard was hustling about, chopping mushrooms and stirring meat and garlic in
a frying pan. There was a big pot of water on to boil.
“Can I help?”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “Stay the fuck out of the way.”
“I could do the salad.”
“You could, but it’s too early. Made it now, time we ate, the lettuce would
be wilted and the tomatoes would taste like wet golf balls.”
“Maybe I’ll just read.”
I got one of the books I’d brought along, Neal Barrett, Jr.’s,The Hereafter
Gang, went out on the back porch and sat in a creaky old rocking chair. The
left side of the porch was blocked with plywood, most likely so Uncle Chester
wouldn’t have to look at the drug dealers next door. The rest of the porch was
screened in. The screen door had the bottom part of its screen knocked loose,
and it curled up as if suffering from heat stroke.
Out behind the house there was a pile of burned garbage, some of it black,
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twisted plastic, some of it blackened cans and dark wisps of paper.
On out a ways was a butane tank, and beyond that, a trickle of woods and
brambles that gradually became more than a trickle. It turned into
full-fledged woods. I wondered how far it went. Had it been in a white section
of town, where property values were up, it would have long been cut down and
concrete would have been spread over it.
Here, it was a strange oasis of green in the midst of a disintegrating
neighborhood that was a slice of human pie neither completely rural nor urban,
a world unto itself.
I read fromThe Hereafter Gang until Leonard came out the back door and called
to me, “Why don’t you go down and rent us a VCR and a movie. And don’t get
none of those damn socially redeeming films or anything you got to read at the
bottom what they’re saying. And let’s don’t seeIt’s a Wonderful Life anymore.”
“Three Stooges OK?”
I drove into town and rented a VCR and checked out a couple of movies.Jaws,
which I’d never seen, andGunga Din, which I saw when I was head high to a
cocker spaniel’s nuts.
By the time I got back to the house I was hot and sweaty and nervous. I was
wondering if I should put the move on Florida, or just watch the movies like a
good little boy. Frankly, I didn’t know how to put the move on anybody
anymore. I was too long out of practice. I began to wonder if she’d show up.
Maybe she’d bring a date. That would be cozy. Perhaps I could loan him some
condoms.
While Leonard hooked up the VCR, I made the salad. I can break lettuce and
slice a tomato with the best of them. I didn’t even screw up when I put on the
bacon bits and the croutons.
About fifteen minutes after I finished, there was a knock on the door and
Leonard let Florida in. She was carrying a bottle of wine and a long loaf of
French bread. She had a little black pocket book on a strap draped over her
shoulder. She was wearing canary yellow this time. It was like all her other
dresses, plain in design, but tight and short and flattering to what it
covered. She didn’t have a date.
“Who’re the sweeties next door?” she asked, giving Leonard the bread and the
wine.
“Just the local crack house,” Leonard said. “They’re a real fun-loving
bunch.”
“They certainly are. They just gave me a verbal anatomical lesson.”
“Sorry,” I said.
She smiled. “That’s all right. I hear worse in court. From my own clients
sometimes.”
We seated ourselves at the table and started on the salad. She ate some of
it, but nothing was said about its excellence. Personally, I thought the
croutons and bacon bits were very fresh. She bragged on the spaghetti,
meatballs, and sauce. Leonard, a regular reader ofBon Appetit, bragged on her
choice of wine. To me, all wine tastes pretty much the same. Bad. But I said I
thought it was pretty good, too.
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After dinner, we watched the movies.Jaws first. The TV was a little-screen
affair Leonard had bought at a pawn shop, but the movie, cropped at the
corners, scared the shit out of me anyway. I’ve never liked water, and I like
sharks even less. Florida sat in the middle of the couch, and during the scary
parts she didn’t leap into my lap for protection or grab my hand. I thought it
would be most unbecoming of me to leap into hers, though I found myself
pulling my feet up onto the couch, in case any floor sharks drifted by.
Between the movies we took a coffee break, and Florida took off her shoes,
then we watchedGunga Din. I loved it again. About midnight the movies were
over and we talked about them for a while, then Leonard went out on the porch
to smoke his pipe.
I stood up from the couch and found I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I
didn’t know what to do with my mouth either. Should I say “Good night?” How
about “What about them Mets?”
Florida didn’t help. She kept her seat and smiled up at me. She said, “I’m
sleepy.”
“Yeah, well, it is late. You need me to drive you home? You can get your car
tomorrow.”
“I’m not that sleepy. I would like to stay here, though.”
“’Cause you’re tired?”
She smiled at me again. This was the sort of smile you reserve for the
feeble-minded. “You want it spelled out?”
“That would help,” I said. “I think I know what you’re saying, but if I’m
wrong, boy, am I going to be embarrassed.”
“You’re not wrong. Let’s go to bed. Together.”
“One minute.”
“One minute?”
I went out on the porch. Leonard was sitting on the glider. The smell of his
cherry tobacco drifted back to me.
He said, “Well, what’s the score?”
“Can I use the bed tonight?”
“Yeah, but you do the laundry tomorrow. I don’t want the wet spot.”
“Right.”
Back inside I tried not to look too much like I was waiting for dessert.
“Well, you ready?”
She laughed at me. It was a nice sound. Like bells tinkling. “Where’s the
bathroom?”
I showed it to her. Before she went inside, she said, “Go out and look in my
car and bring my overnight bag, will you? Keys are in my purse.”
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I got the keys out of her purse, went out and got the bag. She knew she was
going to stay all along. I began to feel a little taller. When I walked past
Leonard, he said, “I hope you still remember what to do.”
“It’ll come to me,” I said, and went inside.
* * *
The overhead fan moved moon shadows and stirred the hot air. The shadows
fluttered over me and the sweat on my chest dried slowly and comfortably.
I was lying on my back, naked. Florida lay beside me, on her stomach,
sleeping. I had my hand resting on one of her smooth, dark buttocks. I
couldn’t resist playing my fingers over her flesh. I replayed what we had done
time and again in my head. It was a good picture show no matter how many times
I rewound it. I liked it better thanJaws orGunga Din.
The bedroom window was up, and from where I lay, my head propped on a pillow,
I could see out clearly. Across the way there was some laughter and some
lights and shadows moved between the windows and the laughter moved with them.
I rolled on my side and put my arm across Florida’s back and kissed her ear.
She smelled of sweat and sex and perfume. She moved and made a noise I liked.
I ran my hand down the small of her back, over her buttocks, down one of her
legs, letting my hand hydroplane over the beads of sweat. She spread her legs
and I ran my hand between them. She was soft there and moist, and she moved
like she thought she might do some business, but then she went still again and
started snoring like a lumberjack.
That was all right. After all we’d done, my ambition might be bigger and
better than the tool I needed for the job. And I was thirsty.
I rolled away from her, eased out of bed, and untangled the sheet from my
ankles. I stretched, got the sheet off the floor, shook it out silently and
tossed it over Florida, taking a good look at her before I did.
I found her panties on the floor, along with the little nightie she had worn
so briefly. I folded them and put them at the foot of the bed, went to the
window and took hold of the bars and looked out. Still busy over there.
The sound of the wind in the bottle tree came to me, like the faraway hooting
of ghostly owls. I listened to the bottles and thought about going to get a
drink, then, behind the sound of the bottle tree, I heard a scraping noise. It
was coming from the next room.
I found my jockey shorts and slipped them on, then my jeans. I had brought a
little .38 revolver from my house, and I got it out of the dresser drawer from
under my socks and eased over to the bedroom door and listened.
No sound.
I opened the door carefully and looked into the living room. I didn’t see
Leonard on the couch. I heard the scraping noise again.
I slipped into the living room and saw there was a light coming from the open
door of the newspaper room. I held the gun down by my leg and went over there
and looked inside. Sitting on the floor, damp newspapers pushed in a heap
behind him, was Leonard. He was pulling at the rotten boards in the flooring,
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prying them loose with a crowbar, stacking them by the papers. The little fan
was pointed in his direction and was set not to rotate. It hummed pleasantly,
like a bee at flower.
I went inside.
“I was going to shoot you,” I said.
He looked up at me.
“Who the hell did you think it’d be?”
“Guess I’ve got the jumps a little, those guys next door.”
“Did it come back to you? The sex stuff, I mean?”
“Yes, but we did some things I don’t remember doing before. I guess it’s OK,
though. Neither of us got hurt.”
“What do you think of her?”
“Well, we haven’t sent out wedding invitations, but I like her. She’s smart.
Witty. Fun to be with.”
“And she’s fucking you.”
“There’s that.”
“Come here and give me a hand. I’ve found something interesting.”
I put the gun on the table next to the little fan, went over and got down on
my knees and grabbed hold of the board he was holding and helped him pull it
up. There was a screech of nails as it came loose.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I came in here and started looking around,
moved some papers and found this spot. You’ll notice, not all these boards are
rotten.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning what happened was the floor was repaired here with untreated wood to
replace old wood, and some of that has rotted because of the roof leak. I
think Uncle Chester took advantage of replacing the floor to make a hiding
place.”
He pointed. “For this,” he said.
In the gap in the floor I could see something large lying in the dark against
the ground. There must have been about four feet between the floor and the
dirt.
“When I moved the papers, I spotted it through the hole and got busy pulling
the rest of the lumber out,” Leonard said. “I didn’t wake up Florida, did I?”
“From what I can tell, she doesn’t sleep. She hibernates.”
“Help me get this out of here, would you?”
I leaned down and got hold of the heavy metal trunk, for that’s what it was,
and we pulled it out of there and set it on the floor beside us. It was army
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green and there was a padlock on it. It hadCHESTER PINE stenciled in white
letters on the lid. It smelled of damp earth.
Leonard got the crowbar and put it inside the loop of the padlock and started
to give it a flex, but I grabbed his arm.
“Before you do that,” I said,. “I was thinking there might be another way.”
He looked at me, and slowly it dawned on him.
10.
Leonard went to get the key while visions of outdated coupons danced in my
head.
When he returned, he tried the key and the lock sprang open. Leonard removed
the lock and lifted the lid. There was a puff of dust and a smell came out of
there I couldn’t quite identify. Musty, a little sharp. Leonard leaned over
and looked inside, and stared. I looked too.
It wasn’t coupons.
There was a small, yellowed skeleton, blackened in spots. The skull was
turned toward me. Some of its teeth were milk teeth. Probably a male, though I
was no expert on that. Eight, nine years old. From the forehead to a spot
square between the eyes, the skull was cracked like the Liberty Bell. The legs
had been sawed off at the knees so that it would fit in the trunk, and the
arms were pulled free at the shoulders, twisted from their sockets like
chicken wings. Beneath and around the bones were moldering magazines, and I
realized that much of the smell was from rotting paper, but that certainly
wasn’t the whole of it. The bones were old, however, and most of death’s
stench had long left them, and perhaps what I did smell on the bones was not
death at all, but mold.
We held our positions for a while, soaking it in. Leonard got one of the
newspapers and crunched it over his hand and made a makeshift glove out of it.
He got down on his knees and reached inside and picked up one of the arm
bones. When he lifted it, it pivoted at the elbow and some of it powdered and
fell back in the box. The bones that made up the hand broke loose from the
wrist and rattled back into the box, fragmenting pages from one of the old
magazines; the fragments wisped and fluttered like a shotgunned bird.
Leonard held the arm bone and looked at it for a while, then carefully put it
back. He used the newspaper to get one of the magazines out of there. He
dropped it on the floor. Pages came apart and powdered the way part of the
bone had powdered.
The magazines had been mostly photographs. A lot of the photographs were
still visible. I didn’t like them. They were of children, male and female, in
sexual positions with adults and each other. Leonard got out a couple other
magazines and put them on the floor. More of the same. They were even some
with children and animals.
I looked at them longer than I wanted to, to make sure I was seeing what I
was seeing, then I squatted back on my haunches and took a deep breath. The
breath was full of rotting paper and that other smell.
Leonard picked up the magazines and returned them to the trunk. He dropped
the newspaper he was using as a glove inside and closed the lid of the trunk
and put the padlock on it and locked it.
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He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants and walked around in a small
circle, then went to the desk chair and sat down and turned the little fan on
his face. He was breathing as if he had just finished a hard workout.
“Uncle Chester,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
I don’t know how long we stayed like that, me on my haunches, Leonard in the
chair, the fan blowing on his face. Finally, I said, “It may not be like it
looks.”
“How can it not be like it looks? This is the key he left me. It goes to the
trunk and it’s got what it’s got inside. That skeleton is a kid’s skeleton.”
“I know.”
“And those magazines. That filth . . . Jesus, was he getting even with me for
being gay? Was he telling me he was a sicko, because he thought I was? Or did
he get so far gone in the head he thought he had him a real treasure here?
That I’d be one happy sonofabitch to have it. What did he do? Get this out now
and then, look at the skeleton, the magazines? Jack off?”
“You’re jumping pretty far.”
“I’m jumping where there is to jump. The sick fuck had the gall to criticize
me, and he was . . . Jesus, Hap. You think there are others?”
“I don’t know what to think. But you’ll need to tell the cops.”
“Yeah, they’re so fucking efficient. Jesus, Hap.”
I stood up slowly. “You could just put the trunk back in the hole, you know.
He’s done what he’s done, and now he’s beyond punishment and can’t hurt anyone
else. You could just go on with things.”
“You don’t mean that?”
“No. . . . Just a small, sad part of me means it.”
“This child needs to be identified. There might be others. Jesus. How long
could this have been going on? There might be a whole slew of bodies under the
house here. They could have been down there when I came for summers. He’s up
here teaching me to tie a fishing fly, reading me a story, tucking me in bed,
and underneath our feet, children are rotting.”
“He was sick in the head, Leonard. You know that. It could have just happened
recently.”
“That only makes it a little better. Shit, it don’t make it any better. . . .
Don’t tell Florida. Not yet.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Christ.”
“Tell you what, Leonard. Let’s put the trunk up for now. Nothing can be
changed tonight. Absorb all this best you can. Tomorrow, after Florida leaves,
we’ll do what you want to do. Of course, once the police know, it isn’t a
secret any longer.”
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“Yeah. Help me with the trunk, Hap.”
We put the trunk back. Leonard put a few boards over the hole and we stacked
some of the newspapers over that. When we were finished, Leonard said,
“Thanks, man.”
“Not at all.”
We washed up and I got that drink of water I’d been wanting. I went back to
the bedroom.
Florida had kicked off the sheet again. She lay on her back. Her face was
smooth and beautiful, and her lips fluttered slightly. Her breasts and pubic
hair caught my attention, but somehow, having seen what I had just seen, I
couldn’t hold any sexual interest.
I took off my clothes and eased back in bed and lay on my back and watched
the fan go around and around. I listened to the wind in the bottle tree and
hoped the souls of the drug dealers were being sucked inside. I wondered if
Uncle Chester’s soul had gone in there, the soul of his victim . . . or
victims.
I thought about the trunk and the magazines and I thought about Leonard. The
world had certainly come down on him. I thought about the child’s skeleton and
what the child had been like when he was alive. Had he been happy before it
happened? Thinking of Christmas? Had he been sad? Had he suffered much? Had he
known what was happening?
Across the way, in the crack house, I heard someone laugh, then someone said
something loud and there was another laugh, then silence.
The shadows changed, broadened. A slice of peach-colored light came through
the bars and fell across the bed and made Florida’s skin glow as if it had
been dipped in honey. I watched her skin instead of the fan, watched it become
bright with light. I rolled over and put my arm around her. Her skin was warm,
but I felt cold. I got up and got the sheet and spread it over her and crawled
under it and held her again. She rolled against my chest and I kissed her on
the forehead.
“Is it morning yet?” she said.
“If you’re a rooster,” I said.
“Umm. I’m not a rooster.”
“I noticed.”
“Your breath stinks.”
“Not yours. It’s sweet as a rose. . . . Of course, it’s growing by the septic
tank.”
“You know, you’re my first peckerwood.”
“And how was it?”
“Except for the itty-bitty dick part, great.”
“Nice.”
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“I’ll show you nice. In a moment.”
She got out of bed and pulled the sheet off and wrapped it around herself.
“I’m going to brush my teeth. Right back. Then you’re going to brush your
teeth.”
“Are we going to check for cavities?”
“There’s one cavity I’d like you to look at,” she said, and left the room. I
actually began to get the trunk and the body and the magazines off my mind. At
least off the front burner.
When she came back, she said, “Leonard’s up. He always get up early?”
“Sometimes.”
“You think we woke him up last night? You know, we were kind of loud.”
“It’s OK. Why don’t you take off the sheet?”
“Teeth.”
I went and brushed then. I heard Leonard in the newspaper room. He seemed to
be pacing. The old floorboards squeaked.
When I came back to the bedroom, Florida had taken off the sheet and was
lying in bed with an unwrapped rubber on her abdomen, a folded pillow under
her ass and her legs spread.
“Hint, hint,” she said.
11.
It was noon and hot and no breeze was blowing. Florida was long gone to visit
her mother. The curb was bordered with cop cars and unmarked cop cars. Leonard
had called the police about an hour back.
Next door, the crack house was up early, surprised it wasn’t them being paid
a visit. They sat and stood on their porch and watched. Mohawk called to one
of the plainclothes cops in the yard—a fat guy with a bad toupee—by name. The
fat cop waved back.
An old black woman on a walker came out of the house across the street and
stood on the porch and looked at us. It was the first time I’d seen her. She
reminded me of an ancient, oversized cricket. Above her, on a high line, a
crow cawed as if it needed a throat lozenge.
Leonard and I were on his front porch, sitting in the glider. Leonard looked
to have shrunk during the night. His complexion had grayed.
A big black detective, fiftyish and hard looking, wearing a loose blue suit
coat, was hunkered down by the glider asking us questions, while a white
detective in a green Kmart suit like I had wanted to buy took notes and did
battle with a fly that kept trying to light on his sweaty, balding head.
“Goddamn fly,” he said.
“They go straight for shit,” the black cop said.
“Yeah,” said the white cop. “Guess they’re gonna be all over you.”
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The big black cop didn’t look at the white cop. You got the idea they did
that kind of dull banter all the time, just to keep themselves awake. The
black cop got a turd-colored cigar out of the inside of his coat and put it in
his mouth and chewed it. He didn’t light it. He said, “That’s about it for
now. The both of you will have to talk again. Maybe come down to the station.”
Inside, we could hear boards being ripped up. A couple of guys in jeans and
T-shirts went by us, carrying shovels into the house.
“My name’s Lt. Marvin Hanson,” said the black cop. “I guess I should have
already told you that. My manners are short. You two might want to hang
somewhere else for a while. They’re gonna be digging and looking for a time. .
. . You fellas want to go with me and have lunch? I’ll make the city pay.”
“Thanks,” Leonard said. “We’ll do that. OK, Hap? I wouldn’t mind getting out
of here.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“What about me?” said the white cop.
“Blow it out your ass, Charlie,” Hanson said.
Charlie chuckled and slipped his notepad inside his coat. Hanson stood up and
I heard his knees pop.
“Be a minute,” he said.
He went in the house and we stayed put. Charlie didn’t say anything. He
didn’t look at us. He just leaned on the porch post and did battle with his
fly.
Over at the crack house, a pizza delivery truck pulled up at the curb and a
nervous black kid wearing a cockeyed paper cap got out and carried half a
dozen large pizza boxes up to the porch.
Some jive talk and some dollars were passed around. The kid got off the porch
without his paper hat. I noticed Mohawk was wearing it. It was too small and
made him look like a black Zippy the Pinhead. Charlie looked over and saw him.
He yelled, “Give it back, asshole.”
“Ah, man,” Mohawk said.
“Give it back.”
“That’s all right,” the pizza kid said, one foot in the truck, one foot out.
“They got another one they can give me.”
“Naw,” Charlie said. “You look good in that one.”
“Whatch y’all got over there?” Mohawk said. “Dead people?”
“Butane leak. Give him the cap back.”
“Yeah, sure,” Mohawk said. “Come get it, kid.”
“Naw,” said Charlie. “You take it down to him. And be polite. Or we might
have to look your place over. See if you got any illegal substances behind the
commode.”
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“You got to have some cause,” Mohawk said.
“A stolen paper pizza hat.”
“I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it.” Mohawk looked around at his porch buddies
and smiled, and they all smiled with him. Parade Float came out of the house
and let the screen door slam like he meant some kind of business.
“That’s right, ain’t it, kid?” Parade Float yelled to the kid. “My man just
borrowed that hat, didn’t he?”
“That’s all right with me,” the kid said. “Damn. You know I don’t deliver
this other pizza quick, I’m gonna have to pay for it. I better rush.”
The kid got in the truck and started to close the door.
“Naw. That’s all right kid,” said Charlie. “Keep your spot. I got money. And
you, Melton. Let me give you some cause to give that hat back. You don’t, I’ll
shove a pipe up your ass. One shoots bullets out the end of it.”
Mohawk—or rather, Melton—smiled. “Well, since you’re talking sexy, Sergeant.
I’ll give it back.”
Mohawk went down the steps and toward the kid. He walked slow and cool, like
he was styling his duds. He threw the hat at the kid and the kid grabbed at it
and missed it, picked it off the ground, put it on his head, got in his truck,
and cranked it up. He rolled away from there bent over the wheel.
Mohawk gave us a hard stare, like any minute he might move over and whip all
of us. Leonard got up and stood at the end of the porch and looked at him,
said, “Why don’t you come over for coffee, later. I’d like to visit . . .
Melton.”
Mohawk smiled loosely and went back to the porch. Some talk floated around
over there and the wordmotherfucker came up. Mohawk went inside and slammed
the screen door. The little crowd on the porch shuffled positions like dogs
looking for the right place to shit, and finally settled down.
“One day, that place over there might have a fire,” Leonard said.
“Yeah, I’d hate that,” said the white cop. “Me being friends with Melton like
I am.”
“I could tell he liked you too,” I said.
“We can’t get enough of each other,” Charlie said. “We see each other time to
time at the station. Melton Danner’s who he is, but he goes by Strip to them
guys. I went to high school with him. I was a couple years up on him. He was
OK then, I guess.”
I said, “What I can’t figure is why you can’t just take those fucks off the
street for good.”
“We’re figurin’ on that one ourselves,” Charlie said. “We’ve asked Uncle Sam
about it, but he don’t have any answers, and I guess we’re not smart enough to
come up with any on our own. Shitasses like that, they got rights, you know?
And they got expensive lawyers ’cause they got lots of dope money. Kind of
makes us feel inefficient, running them in at night so they can get out in the
morning after a hot meal and a shower.”
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Hanson came out of the house. He took his chewed cigar out of his mouth and
flicked it gently and put it back inside his jacket. He walked to the edge of
the porch and spat out a little hunk of tobacco. He looked at Charlie and he
looked at us. “What?” he said.
“We were just talking to Melton,” Charlie said.
“Sweet boy, that Melton,” Hanson said. “And already got his door fixed from
last time we knocked it off the hinges.”
“He’s a beaver, all right,” Charlie said.
Leonard said, “Find anything else?”
“Not yet,” Hanson said. “Come on. Let’s go. Don’t fuck things up, Charlie.”
“Hokeydoke,” Charlie said, and we followed Hanson out to his car.
12.
A burger joint was Hanson’s idea of fine dining. I got coffee, a
cheeseburger, and fries. The coffee tasted as if a large animal had crapped in
it, but the burger and fries had just the right amount of grease; you wrung
out their paper wrappers, there was enough oil to satisfy a squeaky hinge.
Hanson said to Leonard, “You doing OK?”
“Not really,” Leonard said, “but another hundred years, things will get
better. You didn’t just invite us to eat so you could cheer me up, did you?
You got something on your mind?”
Hanson experimented with his coffee. His was good too—I could tell the way
his upper lip quivered. He put the cup down and got out his cigar and put it
in his mouth, talked around it. “I knew your uncle. He’d been down to the
station.”
“For shooting my neighbors in the ass,” Leonard said.
“And he reported them a half-dozen times. We take them in, they get out, they
start over. It’s like fighting back the Philistines with the jawbone of a
hamster.”
“A game,” Leonard said.
“Yep,” Hanson said. “And there’s a nasty, persistent rumor that some of the
cops take bribes.”
“Naw,” Leonard said. “Say it ain’t so.”
“All I got to say on the matter is I’m not one of them, and you damn well
better believe it. As for your uncle, he fancied himself something of a
policeman. You know about that?”
“I know he was a security guard. That he wanted to work in law enforcement.
Wanted to be a detective. I remember he read a lot of true-crime magazines and
books, read mysteries. Anything associated with crime. I know he tried to get
a job on the police force, but by the time he tried he was too old, and before
that, they weren’t gonna have no black man on the LaBorde cops.”
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“Trust me,” Hanson said, “it ain’t no bed of roses now. We still got the
legacy of Chief Calhoun.”
“As I remember,” I said, “in the late sixties the first Chief Calhoun gave
his cops six feet of looped barbed wire with a wooden handle and told them to
use it on some civil rights folks, a peaceful assembly downtown. He had his
cops hit the protestors with the wire. Women and children. The town council
was so broken up about it, they issued all the cops new batons and brought
some martial arts guy in to show them how to use them. The batons left more
legitimate marks.”
“That Calhoun was before my time,” Hanson said. “But his heritage lives on.
Fact is, except for the rhetoric, chief we’ve got now, his son, makes the
original Calhoun look like a liberal. I’m the only black on the police force,
and it’s not because they want me. Calhoun sees me, his stomach hurts and his
dick shrinks up. A nigger with a gun makes him nervous, makes him dream of
white sheets and burning crosses. Worse, I’m a former city nigger, a concrete
and neon jigaboo. Add insult to injury, I been here nearly ten years and I’m
still an outsider, and last but not least, I’m a good cop.”
“And modest,” I said.
“That’s my most pronounced trait,” Hanson said.
“You didn’t invite us to lunch for this either,” Leonard said, “to tell us
you knew my uncle and the department thinks you’re a nigger. You damn sure
didn’t bring us here to tell us what a good cop you are.”
“I’m not sure I brought you here for any reason makes sense. I wanted to ask
some more questions, kind’a.”
“The sphinx would make more sense than you do,” Leonard said. “You haven’t
asked a question one.”
Hanson sipped the bad coffee without removing his cigar, said, “I don’t have
any reason to doubt your uncle committed this murder.”
“Hey,” Leonard said, “thanks for the news flash. But I’m gonna tell you
something. My first impression was same as everyone else’s. But I’ve thought
on things some, and my uncle could be an asshole, but he didn’t kill any kid.
I knew him better than that. There’s something else to all of this, I don’t
care how it looks.”
Hanson shrugged and spread his hands. “Chester came to the station talking
about child killings not so long ago. You know that?”
“No,” Leonard said. “What do you mean he talked about child killings?”
“What I’m saying, is there may be more murders, more bodies than this.”
“Didn’t think you were ripping up my flooring looking for nickels had fallen
through the cracks,” Leonard said, “but you still haven’t answered my
question.”
“And if he was murdering children,” I said, “why would he tell you?”
“Frankly, everyone thought he was nuts,” Hanson said. “I think he was too,
toward the end there. As to why would he tell us? Throw us off. A cheap
thrill. Or he was trying to prove what a good cop he could be. Uncover the
murders, but not turn up the killer.”
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“Which you think was him,” Leonard said.
Hanson shrugged again.
“A friend of ours thinks Chester may have had Alzheimer’s,” I said.
“Could be,” Hanson said. “But Chester said there were child murders, and now
there are. One, at least.”
“Didn’t you guys check into what he said?” I said. “You do that sort of
thing, don’t you?”
“When we’re not at the doughnut shop. . . . All Chester said was there were
child murders going on in the black neighborhood, and that no one outside of
the neighborhood gave a damn.”
“Was he right?” I asked.
“There were reports over the years of missing children.”
“How many years,” I said.
“Ten at least. And according to the files all those cases had been looked
into, but nothing had been solved. According to written remarks made by a
couple of officers no longer on the force, they felt the parents had done the
children in because they were too much trouble to care for, but they couldn’t
prove it, and they didn’t give a damn. In fact, written at the bottom of one
report was ‘One less nigger won’t hurt anything.’ That was just ten years ago.
Civil rights is sinking in slow here. At least in the area of law
enforcement.”
“There’s always a difference when a crime is a black crime,” Leonard said,
“especially if it’s against another black and done in the black section. Black
man killed a white, cops’d be on the case like hogs on corn. Listen here,
Lieutenant, this lunch is scrumpdillyicious and all, but you’re trying to be
too clever. You’re talking, but you’re not saying anything. You’re trying to
see if I’ve got any strings you can play, aren’t you? Think maybe I’m holding
something back, something could help your case?”
“Could be you’ve forgotten something,” Hanson said. “Could be you know
something about him from the past might have something to do with now, the
murders.”
“Knew anything, I’d tell you. Him being my uncle or not. Maybe ’cause he is
my uncle. You don’t have to burger-and-coffee me to find things out. I told
you about the keys, the coupons, the paperback ofDracula. Turned the skeleton
in, didn’t I?”
“That’s what you’re doing?” I said to Hanson. “Trying to see if Leonard knows
more than he’s told?”
“He ain’t hip,” Leonard said to Hanson. “He can’t see the signs they’re on
his face.”
“Yeah, hip’s a problem,” Hanson said. “But you may not be so hip yourself,
Leonard. I’m merely being polite here. Getting you away from that place,
feeding your face and your partner’s too. I mean, I got a few questions, but
they’re all routine.”
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Leonard smiled at Hanson.
Hanson smiled back.
A couple of sharks trying to outflank one another.
Leonard said, “Why don’t you run your program by me one more time, and you
can leave out the cryptic stuff that’s supposed to scare me, stuff where I’m
supposed to think you know more than you know, so if I know more than I’m
letting on, I’ll get scared and go all to pieces and spill the beans.”
Hanson said, “All right then. The bare bones. Your uncle said there were
child murders. There was no evidence of that. Just evidence that over the
years children had come up missing. It wasn’t a case I was familiar with. I
gave the file notes on missing kids in the black section a once-over. It
didn’t look good, but there wasn’t anything there to go on. What your uncle
wanted was for us to give him a team, some men to work with, and he was going
to solve the case.”
“He said that?” Leonard said.
“Said he and his associate would prove to us something was happening and who
did it.”
“Who was his associate?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t name him. Said it was best he kept his man on the outside. Said
he wasn’t willing to turn it completely over to the department because it
would be swept under the rug. Said he needed our facilities. Maybe he didn’t
even have an associate. Maybe he did.”
“You mean maybe it was me,” Leonard said.
“I didn’t say that,” Hanson said.
“Needless to say,” I said, “you didn’t give Chester his own team.”
“No,” Hanson said. “He was pretty erratic, so he was hard to take seriously.
He didn’t really present any evidence, just talked. And sometimes kind of
randomly. Like he’d forgotten what he’d come around for. Everytime he showed
up, he was a little less with it. Not that we’d have given him his own team if
he hadn’t been nuts. No insult intended there, Leonard.”
“None taken,” Leonard said. “But I still don’t know any more than I’ve told
you.”
Hanson removed his cigar and put it inside his coat pocket. “OK then,” he
said, “I’m through being clever. For now. You fellas want more coffee?”
“I’ll have a Coke,” Leonard said. “Long as you’re buying.”
13.
Three days later and the morning was very bright and the light that came
through the windows was splotched with eyeshade-green patches from the sun
shining through oak leaves and there were intervals of jet-black shadows made
by the bars over the windows.
We had spent the time since the discovery of the body out at our places
outside of town, but now we were back. The cops were through and no more kid
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skeletons had been found, though Leonard had profited fifty-five cents found
on the ground beneath the flooring, turned in by Hanson, who may have done it
to prove to us he was an honest cop. Hell, it might have even come out of his
pocket.
The law had been nice enough to haul off the newspapers and the rotten
lumber, just in case a clue was lurking in a knothole or behind the sports
sections, and Leonard bought some one-by-eight pine boards and a sack of nails
and we went to putting in new subflooring. That’s what we were doing the
morning I’m talking about. The boards were fresh cut and the weather so hot
you could smell the resin on them and feel a powdering of sawdust on your
hands. It was a little odd, putting that flooring down and living in a house
where just a few days ago Leonard had made a bony discovery, but with the
newspapers hauled off, the smell of new lumber, and the hot sunshine sticking
through the windows, the house seemed different somehow, as if it had never
held the remains of a long-dead child.
When we had a good chunk of flooring replaced with Lap ’n’ Gap decking,
Leonard said, “Let’s break it.”
We poured some lukewarm coffee into our cups and went out on the porch and
sat in the swing. It was not so humid this day, so maybe that was better,
though it’s always been my contention that at the bottom of it all, the
distinction is bullshit. Bake or fry, hot is hot. Least when it’s humid, I
know I’m hot, when it isn’t, I get the feeling I’m being cooked up
secretively.
We sipped the coffee for a while and looked at the street and watched a few
cars go by. Over at the crack house, it was quiet.
Leonard went back into the house and came out with a bag of his favorite
cookies, vanilla creme. Well, actually his favorite is vanilla anything. He
kept the bag on his side of the swing and didn’t volunteer me any cookies. He
made me ask for one.
“You haven’t been the most talkative about all this,” I said.
“A board’s a board,” Leonard said. “You do what I say, you won’t fuck up.”
“Your uncle, Leonard. You haven’t talked about your uncle.”
“I’m still putting it together. Not just the stuff with the skeleton, but my
life.”
“Is this going to be one of those insightful moments?”
“I think so. You see, all I ever wanted was to be loved and comfortable and
fulfilled in my work. Way it stands, the family I cared about is dead, and has
been dead for years, except one, and he just died, and without ever saying he
was sorry or just taking me as I am. I guess I’m more comfortable now
financially than I was a short time ago because he’s dead, but the house I
inherited and loved turns out to have a dead kid under the floorboards, and my
uncle is supposed to have put him there, and if that ain’t shitty enough, I’ve
got no work to go to or feel good about. Think I sound sorry enough for
myself?”
“You could maybe throw in a favorite dog got hit by a truck or something. And
you didn’t mention Mama or a train, like in the country-and-western songs.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. And I do have my cookies. What about Florida?
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What’s she think about all this?”
“She came out to my house day before yesterday. She was sorry about the whole
thing. Shocked. What you’d expect. She said to give you her best.”
“I notice she hasn’t been back over here.”
“Yeah, well, we just got back. What’d you think, she’d be waiting on the
porch?”
“I guess I’m getting sensitive in my old age.”
“She’ll be back. Or I think she will. I hope she will.”
“How’s the relationship?”
“I’m not sure. We like each other. We have sex and we can joke with each
other, and I want there to be more to it than there is at the moment, but I
get the feeling she doesn’t want to be seen with me in public.”
“I have the same problem.”
“Seriously. I think it’s because I’m white. She said as much once, but I
thought she got past it.”
“She may know better than feeling that way, but that doesn’t mean she can get
completely past it. Not in that short time anyway. Hey, look at it this way,
she’s made great strides. She’s fucking you, and you’re white.”
“That’s what I like about you, Leonard. You’re such a romantic.”
“Hap, you think my uncle killed that kid?”
“I don’t know. It looks that way. Main thing is you don’t think so.”
“I did at first, and you told me not to jump to conclusions. Remember?”
“I’ll be honest. I thought he did it the moment you found the body. I said
what I said to be nice to you. There’s things point to him having done it,
besides the obvious, the skeleton under the floorboards. Stuff like him being
a cop freak. That by itself doesn’t mean anything, but lots of times, people
who are into wanting to be cops and can’t, people obsessed with it, have some
kind of control fixation. Child abuse, the abuse of anyone weaker than you, is
a form of control. Like rape. Wife-beating. Maybe your uncle was an abused
child and it affected him. It all goes together.”
“I know my uncle.”
“You knew your uncle.”
“He didn’t change that much. I never got any indication from him he was an
abused child. And if he was, it didn’t make him a child abuser. Lots of abused
children aren’t child molesters. He was the one taught me how to live, how to
think. He didn’t just turn around one day and start wanting to kill children.”
“It could have been going on for a time.”
Leonard shook his head. “Nope. And I don’t think he had a power fixation. I
think the man wanted a job with respect, and law enforcement was it. He just
never got it because of who he was and where he was. He may have begun to lose
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his head some at the end, but that doesn’t mean he lost his ethics. I want to
know what happened, Hap, no matter what the results, and I want you to help
me.”
“What makes you think you have to ask?”
14.
We finished our coffee and were about to go back to work, when across the
street we saw the old, black lady on the walker come onto her front porch. It
was a slow and dutiful process, her coming outside, and watching her made me
nervous. The screen door slammed her in the hip because she couldn’t move away
from it fast enough, and she wobbled and the porch groaned loud enough for us
to hear across the street. I bet she didn’t weigh ninety pounds, but I could
see boards sagging as she went.
She looked across the street at us and we waved. She waved back, careful to
do it so her arm didn’t come off at the shoulder.
She stood in the frame of her walker and watched us awhile, then slowly
lifted her hand and flicked a come-over signal with her fingers.
We went over and stood at the bottom step of her porch and looked up at her.
The hot sunlight lay on her like a slice of thin cheese and showed her to no
advantage. She looked as if she had been boiled down and wrung out and left to
dry. The wrinkles in her face were very deep and rivered with sweat. Her
prune-colored eyes were runny and the whites were no longer white; they were a
Hiroshima of exploded blood vessels: pink, red, and blue. Her false teeth hung
too low in her mouth at the top and were set too high at the bottom, giving
the impression of living things trying to climb out of a hole. Her head was
mostly bald and her hair was spaced in gray tufts and looked like dirty cotton
that had been blown by the wind to collect on a damp, black rock. Her breasts
sagged and wobbled against her ribs inside her simple blue shift. She wore
fuzzy pink house shoes on her feet and one black toe, like a water-logged
pecan, poked through a hole in the right one.
I tried to imagine her younger, middle-aged even, but it was impossible to
envision that she might ever have looked any different.
I said, “We help you with something, ma’am?”
She took a deep breath, collecting enough wind to speak, ignored me, and
turned to Leonard. “You,” she said, “the colored boy,” just in case Leonard
might be confused on his ancestry. “I heard about your uncle. I don’t believe
it for a minute. I don’t care if they found babies in his toilet, he didn’t
murder and saw up no chil’ren. I’ve known that boy all his life.”
“Word sure gets around,” Leonard said.
“Ain’t no secrets in nigger town,” she said.
“No, ma’am, guess not,” Leonard said.
“And if the policemens catch anybody it’ll be an accident. They done decided
it was Chester, and that will be the end of it.”
“What I’m afraid of too, ma’am,” Leonard said.
“Them boys next door,” she said. “Y’all don’t have nothing to do with them
niggers. They’re on drugs.”
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“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said. “We was kinda thinkin’ they were.”
“You can tell way they walk,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.
“And they sell’m too,” she said. “Every little chile you see go in over there
and come out, they done sold them some drugs. They kill’n their own, and I
betcha some fat-cat peckerwood somewheres is on the gettin’ end of the money.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.
She looked at me, as if examining my fat-cat white peckerwood tendencies. I
guess none showed. Her wrinkles shifted. She said, “Listen here, I got some
apple and pear pies baking. You boys come on in and help me get ’em out of the
oven a’foe they burn up. I wore myself out bakin’ ’em.”
We mounted the porch and it screamed at us. I looked down and saw a split in
the boards and the ground looking up at me. That old lady fell through those
boards, she’d break a leg or kill herself.
The smell of baking pies from inside was rich and fine and made me hungry. I
opened the screen door and held it. Leonard stood beside her while she used
the walker, and after she made a few short steps she said to me, “Close the
screen door, son. You’re lettin’ in flies. I’m gonna be coming for a bit.”
I closed the screen until she got closer, which, true to her words, took
awhile, and when she was close enough, I held the screen open and she and
Leonard went past to the tune of straining boards.
I followed inside and closed the screen and left the front door open because
it was hot in there with all the heat from the oven and there being only a
little rotating fan on the kitchen table to cool the place. I felt mildly
dizzy, as if I had been riding too fast on a merry-go-round. When I looked
back at the screen door, it had begun to bead and buzz with house flies hoping
for a chance to wipe their shitty legs on some pies.
The kitchen was very clean, and beneath the smell of the pies I caught a hint
of Pine Sol. I wondered if she cleaned the place herself, and couldn’t figure
the how of it if she did. Being frail as she was, a bathroom trip would be
like an expedition through the South American jungles.
One wall was quite amazing. It was papered with snapshots taped to it, some
in color, some black and white, some very old and very faded. Where the wall
gave them up was a doorway, and through the doorway I could see another room,
and the part of the wall I could see in there was also covered in photographs.
Over the stove hung an ancient dime-store painting of a serene Jesus dressed
in red robe and sandals, a worshipful beggar at his feet. The painting was in
a frame behind clean glass, but the frame was too big and the glass wasn’t
pressing the picture and the picture had started to fade and heat-curl at one
corner, giving the impression that Jesus’s robe was rolling up and would soon
expose private matters to the beggar.
The rest of the kitchen was cabinets and pot-holder hooks with pot holders
and transparent, time-yellowed curtains over a slanting window.
“Turn the oven off and get the pies out,” she said, and leaned forward on her
walker as if getting lower would help her breathe better.
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Leonard turned off the oven and got a gloved pot holder off a hook and opened
the oven and took out three thick and beautifully crusted pies and sat them on
top of the stove. The smell of pies filled my head thick as an allergy.
The old lady said, “You don’t remember me, do you, Lenny?”
Leonard closed up the oven and looked at her for a long moment, then shook
his head. “No, ma’am. Guess I don’t. Haven’t been back here in a time. I came
to visit my uncle, it was the Browns lived here. Mr. Brown, he worked for the
railroad or somethin’.”
“Browns are all dead and buried,” she said. “They call me MeMaw.”
“MeMaw?” Leonard said. “MeMaw Carter. You used to live over on Sheraton. I
used to go over to the park there. My uncle brung me. Y’all visited while I
played.”
“That was just for a couple of years,” she said. “So I ain’t surprised you
don’t remember me. You was practically a baby. I don’t never forget nothing,
though. You know there ain’t no park there now? None you can use, anyway.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Drug niggers took it over. Kids with them beepers and needles and pistols in
their pants. Ain’t no place to do nothing ’round here anymore but get killed.
My youngest son, Clarence, moved me here ten year ago. Thought it was a better
place than Sheraton Street. Was, then. Old house was falling apart and all
them drug niggers around. Now I got them ’cross the street and this old house
ain’t much.”
“You used to tell me stories about Br’er Rabbit and such,” Leonard said.
“And you ate my cookin’ when you come with your uncle. You liked pies and
vanilla cookies. Any kind of vanilla cookie.”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s me. I oughta remembered you right off.”
She showed Leonard an acre of dentures and some of her wrinkles straightened
out. “I’ve changed a little, Lenny. You know how old I am?”
“No, ma’am. I’m no good guessing ages.”
“Don’t guess no woman’s age,” she said. “That’ll just cause you trouble.
’Course, you get old as me, it don’t matter no more. One day to the next
couldn’t make me look no older. ’Foe long I’ll be bakin’ pies for Jesus. . . .
I’m ninety-five years old.”
“You don’t look it,” Leonard said.
She made a noise in her throat that sounded like crisp crackers being
crumbled. “You don’t start lyin’ to MeMaw now. I look a hundred and
ninety-five. You boys, help me sit down.”
We got hold of her arms, which felt like sweaty sticks covered in foam
rubber, and helped her away from the walker and onto a hard-backed chair at
the kitchen table.
She sighed and said, “Thank you. That sittin’ part and gettin’ up by myself
tuckers me. Turn the fan on me.”
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I twisted the fan around so that the rotation stayed mostly in her direction.
I said, “You like a drink of water?”
“No,” she said, “I’m OK, but I’d like you boys to help me eat some of that
pie.”
* * *
Leonard sliced us pie and poured us milk and we ate. The pie was good. It
made me nostalgic for home and my mother, but my mother was long gone and so
was the home where I had been raised.
I turned and looked at the photographs. They were of all manner of folks.
People black and white and brown. The clothes and hairstyles and backgrounds
revealed just how long ago this whole photographic display had begun, though a
lot of the photos appeared to have been taken in recent years on MeMaw’s front
porch, or in her yard, or right here in the kitchen. A healthy number of them
showed people eating at her table.
“Quite a collection of photographs you have there, MeMaw,” I said.
She turned her head toward the wall and looked at them. “Got a whole nuther
room of ’em. I always take pictures of folks. Cheers me, all them I’ve met. I
look at them walls, I got memories.”
“Who are they all?” Leonard asked.
“Some family,” MeMaw said. “Most ain’t, though. There’s people come by to
check the gas meter or the water or bring the mail, and they’re nice enough,
I’ll take their picture and put it up there, try and remember what we talked
about that day. This here,” she waved her finger at a row of photos, “is all
my family.”
Some of the photos she was pointing to were old and some were new, and some
had been taken by someone other than MeMaw, because she was in a number of the
photos with her children. In the earlier ones she didn’t look a lot different
than she did now until you got to the oldest black and whites, and even then
she looked elderly, but with darker hair and more of it, less wrinkles maybe,
and a few of her own teeth.
She pointed out and named her children, and there were eight of them, five
girls and three boys. The first seven close together, the last, a boy, born
when she was forty-five, way past the time she thought she’d have another
child.
“Ain’t one more loved than the other,” MeMaw said, “but Hiram, he’s the baby.
A surprise. Lives in Tyler, but travels a lot. He’s a salesman.”
I looked at her baby. In the most recent picture she had of Hiram he looked
my age and size, but with thicker shoulders. He had a personable face.
The latest photograph of her eldest child, Pleasant, showed a woman who
looked seventy-five if she was a day. MeMaw said she was retired and had a
little check, but was in business for herself, selling leather-stitched white
Bibles.
We got a look at all the grandkids and great-grandkids, and she told us their
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names and stories about each one.
“How come you started doing this, MeMaw?” Leonard asked. “Taking all these
pictures? Puttin’ ’em on the wall?”
“All my family done gone ’cept one boy, Cletus. Moved off tryin’ to get
somethin’ decent for themselves. I wanted somethin’ to do, and after my
husband, Mr. Carter, died, I took to takin’ even more pictures. Anyone I
liked, I took their picture and taped it to the wall. Bet I’ve gone through
half-dozen of them Polaroids. Every time I wear one out, my children buy me
another. There’s pictures of your Uncle Chester in the other room, and an old
one of you. I took it when you was just a child.”
“No joke?” Leonard said. “Be all right I see them?”
“Have to look for them,” she said. “I ain’t aimin’ to get up right now.
They’ll be in the other room.”
I went in there with Leonard, and it was stuffy and hot and all the walls
were full of photographs, some relatively fresh, some wrinkling from age and
heat and turning green. It made me feel a little lonely somehow.
On one wall near the floorboard Leonard found a black-and-white picture of
his uncle and himself sitting on a merry-go-round in a park, most likely the
park Leonard talked about over on Sheraton Street. Leonard was probably about
ten years old and his uncle was our age.
The photograph wasn’t too good, and Leonard’s features faded into his black
skin. His teeth showed white in his face and he looked happy. His uncle had
caught a ray of sunlight and was more defined. He looked a lot like Leonard
looked now. I took a minute to make fun of Leonard, just so he knew I loved
him, and he showed me his middle finger to show he cared about me too.
We checked around for a long, hot time and found more photos of his uncle at
different ages, and finally, on the way out, we came across one near the door.
The Uncle Chester there looked a lot like the Uncle Chester I had seen in his
coffin, only a little less puffy and a lot less dead. He was standing next to
a tall angular black man about his age, and he had his arm around him. They
weren’t exactly smiling. They looked self-conscious, as if preparing for a
hemorrhoid operation but bound to make the best of it.
“Who’s that with him?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Leonard said.
MeMaw heard us. “I’m pretty sure that’s Illium,” she said. “Take it off the
wall and let me see it.”
Leonard freed the photo and took it into the kitchen and gave it to MeMaw.
She said, “That’s who it is. Illium Moon.”
“Who is he?” Leonard asked.
“He and your uncle was near growed together at the hip,” she said. “You seen
one, you near saw the other. Illium moved here from San Antonio. He’d been a
policemans or somethin’ like that. He and your uncle met at the domino shack
up by the highway.”
“Illium still around?” Leonard asked.
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She studied on that for a moment. “I ain’t seen him for a bit. Couple weeks,
I reckon. Hadn’t really thought about it. Your uncle not around, I ain’t
expected to see him. Got so you couldn’t think of one without the other.”
“You know where he lives?” Leonard asked. “Being a friend of Uncle Chester’s,
I thought I might like to talk to him.”
“No, I don’t,” MeMaw said, “but he works over to the colored Baptist church
sometimes. I know that much. He used to drive the bookmobile too.”
“For the library?” I asked.
“It wasn’t the real library, the one downtown,” she said. “Illium, he was
like your uncle. He wanted to do good by folks, so he got this bus . . . or
what do they call them now?”
“Van?” I asked.
“That’s it,” she said. “He had him a van fixed up with his own books, and he
went around and loaned books here in the East Side, like a library. I never
did take none of ’em, ten year ago I quit reading anything ’sides the good
book since I couldn’t get around good enough to go to church. I figured God
would let me slide on that, I kept knowledge of His word. But I thought Illium
was a good man. Sometimes your uncle helped him out, rode around with him.”
“Can you tell us where this church is where Illium works?” Leonard asked.
“I can,” MeMaw said. “But first, Lenny, you go over there and open that
cabinet.”
Leonard went over to the cabinet she was indicating with a cadaverous finger
and opened it. There was a snapshot camera inside.
“Bring me that camera,” she said.
Leonard did.
MeMaw looked at me, said, “What’s your name now, son?”
“Hap Collins,” I said.
“Hap, you and Lenny sit together at the table.”
We sat and pulled our chairs close and leaned our heads together.
“Ya’ll’d make good salt and pepper shakers,” she said, raised the camera to
her face, grinned, said, “Now, boys, say cheese.”
15.
“Do you remember seeing Illium at the funeral?” I asked.
“No,” Leonard said, “but I wasn’t looking for him. He could have been there.”
“I don’t think so, and if he and your uncle were as close as MeMaw claims, he
oughta been, don’t you think?”
I shifted gears on my old Dodge pickup and we climbed a hill full of potholes
and crumbling slabs of weather-heaved blacktop. The sun was near midsky, and
it shone on the faded gray hood of my truck and made me squint, and the hot
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wind blowing through the open windows made me sweat as if I were in a sauna. I
reminded myself that in another couple of hours it would really be hot.
I had brought my truck back with me when we returned to Uncle Chester’s house
from our three days in the country, and I was glad to have it, old and
uncomfortable as it was. When I first moved in with Leonard, he had picked me
up and brought me here and left my truck back home because it was giving me
trouble. Turned out the trouble was burned-out rings and cheap gas and no
money to fix it.
But on our return to Uncle Chester’s, Leonard needed a way to haul lumber, so
he paid for me to get a ring job and real gas. Now, I was no longer polluting
half of East Texas, and felt better about that, and without my telltale cloud
of black smoke following me I was less embarrassed to be seen driving it.
We were following MeMaw’s directions, looking for the First Primitive Baptist
Church, and along the way I got a good look at the East Section, saw parts of
it I had never seen before, realized just how truly isolated I was from the
way of life here. Along with decent houses, there were houses next to them
without electric wires, houses broke down and sagging, their sides actually
held up with posts, and out back were outdoor toilets and rusted-out
appliances in which garbage had been burned and not collected because the
garbage trucks didn’t always come down here.
Black children with blacker eyes wearing dirty clothes sat in yards of
sun-bleached sand and struggling grass burrs and looked at us without
enthusiasm as we drove past.
It was near midday and grown men of working ages were wandering the streets
like dogs looking for bones, and some congregated at storefronts and looked
lonesome and hopeless and watched with the same lack of enthusiasm as the
children as we drove past.
“Man, I hate seeing that,” Leonard said. “You’d think some of these
sonofabitches would want to work.”
“You got to have jobs to work,” I said.
“You got to want jobs too,” Leonard said.
“You saying they don’t?”
“I’m saying too many of them don’t. Whitey still has them on his farm, only
they ain’t doing nothing there and they’re getting tidbits tossed to them like
dogs, and they take it and keep on keeping on and wanting Whitey to do more.”
“Maybe Whitey owes them.”
“Maybe he does, but you can be a cur or you get up off your ass and start
seeing yourself as a person instead of an underdog that’s got to take those
scraps. I’ve always worked, Hap. Be it in the rose fields or as a handyman
laborer or raising hunting dogs, and you ain’t never known me to take handout
checks because I’m black, and my uncle didn’t either.”
“Most of the people taking handout checks are white, Leonard.”
“That’s true, and I ain’t got nothing for those sonofabitches either. Unless
you can’t walk or you’re in temporary straits, there ain’t no excuse for it.”
“One minute it’s things are bad here because it’s the black section of town,
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and next time you open your mouth you’re saying it’s the blacks’ fault. You
can’t have it both ways.”
“Yes, you can. Ain’t nothing one way, Hap. Everything’s got two sides and
sometimes the same problem’s got two different answers. It’s the ambition and
pride these folks are missing. They don’t want nothing but to exist. They
think God owes ’em a living.”
“And some of them just haven’t got jobs, Leonard, and it’s as simple as
that.”
“Some of them,” Leonard said. “Some gonna tell you too they got to sell drugs
to survive ’cause things are bad, and I say you can rationalize anything. ‘I
got to sell drugs, I got to sell myself, I got to eat shit with flies on it.’
You don’t got to do nothin’ like that. You grew up poor, Hap. You ever want to
sell drugs or hire out to get your dick sucked or maybe lay back and take a
check?”
“Government could mail me a check, they wanted to. But I’d want someone to go
out to the mailbox and bring it to me. Maybe getting my dick sucked wouldn’t
be so bad either, especially someone wanted to pay me for it.”
“Bullshit. I know you. You got pride.”
“Not everyone has had the chance to have pride, Captain Know-It-All. You
don’t come with it built in. Like new cars, there are some options got to be
installed.”
“Yeah, but there’s them that go out and get the options, use their own tools
to put them in. Like your dad and my uncle. From what you’ve told me, your dad
didn’t have it so easy.”
He hadn’t. His mother had died when he was eight, and his father had put him
to work in the cottonfields, and when Dad didn’t pick the same cotton as a
grown man, his father had put the horsewhip to him. I remember as a child
seeing my father without his shirt, lying on the floor in front of the TV
after a hard day’s work at his garage, and there were thin white lines across
his back, scars from the whip. My father could neither read nor write. He
never missed a day’s work. He never complained. He died with mechanic’s grease
on his face and hands. I’m glad I never met my grandfather. I’m glad he was
dead before I was born.
“I had advantages still, Leonard. I’m white. Even the worst of the whites,
the white trash, have had it better than minorities.”
“Minorities are one thing. Choice is another. Check and see how many
Orientals are on the welfare rolls. You ain’t gonna find many.”
“Check and see how many of those Orientals have ancestors were owned by white
folks and sold on slave blocks. Frankly, Leonard, I think a Bible quotation is
in order here. ‘Judge not least ye be judged.’ That’s close, anyway.”
“Yeah, well, I got one too. ‘Decide to be a fuckup, you’re gonna be a
fuckup.’”
“What bible’s that in?”
“Leonard’s Bible.”
I shut my mouth and brooded. There was some truth in what Leonard said, but
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ultimately, in my mind, there’s no one more obnoxious and self-righteous than
the self-made man. And no one more admirable.
Leonard told me to take a right and I did and we rolled off the ravaged
blacktop and onto a smooth cement street with beautiful sweet gum trees and
broad-limbed pecans skirting it on either side. The sunlight made bruise-blue
shadows out of the trees and laid them on the street and behind the trees on
either side were nice, inexpensive houses with clean side-walks leading up to
them.
Leonard looked at the house and said, “See, ain’t everybody down here got to
live in the garbage and walk the streets.”
“They got jobs, Leonard.”
“My point exactly.”
“Remind me to kill you in your sleep,” I said.
Soon the street gave up its trees, and there was just the blistering sunlight
and on the right a couple acres of land and on it a parking lot and a
whitewash church with a plain black-and-white sign out front that readFIRST
PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CHURCH .REVEREND HAMIL FITZGERALD OFFICIATING .
Behind the church was a simple blue frame house with a well-tended lawn with
a sprinkler spitting on it and onto a number of circular, brick-enclosed
flower beds. In the driveway was a recently washed last year’s blue Chevy and
parked nearby was a small blue-and-white bus withFIRST PRIMITIVE BAPTIST
CHURCH painted on the side. The bus looked fairly old, and a few of the back
windows had been replaced with plyboard. I figured if you scratched the
blue-and-white paint deep enough, you’d find a yellow school bus
underneath—one of those they used to call the short bus, the one the retarded
kids rode to school.
I pulled up in the lot and parked.
Leonard said, “I see a church and I get to thinking how black folks are
mostly taught how to accept their misery through God. It pisses me off.”
I didn’t say anything. We got out of the truck and Leonard looked at the
church sign, said, “Never can figure that ‘Primitive’ part out. What’s that
mean? Everybody carries spears?”
“Leonard,” I said. “You got a bad attitude. We find the Reverend, maybe I
ought to do the talking.”
“A white guy?” Leonard said. “I don’t think so. Trust me, I know how to warm
a guy like the Reverend up. I grew up here, remember. I can play the game, I
have to.”
We walked alongside the church and on toward the house out back. Back of the
church was green grass and a playground that broke into the side yard of the
house. The air smelled like mowed grass and floral perfume.
We could hear a sound coming from the back of the church, a thumping sound,
so we stopped to listen to it and to the sound of the sprinkler sputtering,
and within seconds we both knew what the thumping sound was because we had
both made that sound before.
It was the sound of fists striking a speed bag, quick and rhythmic, sweet and
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sure.
16.
The sound came from an elongated, low-roofed addition to the back of the
church, and from where we now stood, we could see the church was much larger
than it appeared from the street. We walked toward the sound.
The back door was propped open, and we went in and down the hall, following
our ears. We came to a closed door on the right, and the sound came from
behind it. I opened the door and looked inside and felt the air-conditioning
and liked it.
It was a small but nice gymnasium. The floor was smooth and shiny and there
was a basketball goal at one end, and against one wall some pull-out
bleachers. In a corner of the gym was a speed-bag prop, and striking the bag
was a bare-to-the-waist black man wearing blue jogging pants and black boxing
shoes. He was fortyish, about five-ten with thick shoulders and sweaty skin
and close-cropped graying hair. He looked strong, if a bit thick in the
middle, but the middle was solid as a truck tire, and the muscles in his arms
and chest coiled and released as he hit. He moved quickly and expertly and the
bag sang to him as he did.
We stood there for a moment, watching him work, admiring it, then he paused
for a moment, caught the bag with one hand, blew out some air, turned his head
and saw us.
“I do something for you gentlemen?” he asked, and started slipping off the
bag gloves.
We walked over to him and he tossed the gloves aside and we shook hands and
introduced ourselves. He turned out to be the Reverend Fitzgerald, his own
sweet self.
“You look pretty good,” I said.
“Golden Gloves when I was a kid,” he said, but not to me. He was studying
Leonard. “I teach some of the neighborhood boys. I know you?” he asked
Leonard.
“I don’t think so,” Leonard said.
“Mr. Fitzgerald,” I said. “We’re looking for a man we’ve been told works
here. Illium Moon.”
“Illium?” he said. He used his hands to wipe sweat from his chest, then wiped
his hands on his pants. “Haven’t seen him in days. Does a bit of handy work
around here now and then. He’s retired, so he doesn’t want anything steady.
Sort of chooses his own hours. I pay him a little. He helps run some of the
children’s programs from time to time. Assistant-coaches volleyball and
baseball.”
“Drives a bookmobile too,” I said.
“That’s right,” he said. “But not for the church. That’s his own project.
He’s got all manner of projects.”
“When did you see him last?” Leonard asked.
“I don’t know,” Fitzgerald said. “Week or two ago. You men don’t look like
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cops.”
“Aren’t,” I said. “We just need to find him on a personal matter.”
“Serious?” Fitzgerald asked.
“He was a friend of Leonard’s uncle. We’d just like to talk to him. Know
where he lives?”
“Out in the country. Somewhere off Calachase Road. To be honest, I’m not
entirely certain. Here, let’s step into my office.”
We followed Fitzgerald out of the gym and down the hallway and into a small
paneled room with a desk and the expected religious paintings: Jesus on the
cross. Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist. Some guy wrestling with an
angel. On his desk Fitzgerald had one of those old clay ash-trays like get
made at camp. It was gray-green and cracked and I had an idea about it and
thought I’d warm him up. “Your kid make that?” I said.
“I’m not married,” he said. “Actually, I made that when I was a kid. For my
father. Sit down.”
So much for warming him up. There were a couple of leather chairs in front of
the desk, and a similar one behind it. Fitzgerald took his position behind the
desk, and me and Leonard manned the remaining chairs. Mine had something wrong
with the swivel and wouldn’t move, but Leonard’s worked just fine. He was
turning slowly left to right. He always got the best stuff.
We sat for a moment listening to the air-conditioning hum. Fitzgerald clasped
his hands together. He had a friendly face. The kind of face you’d tell your
troubles to. He said, “Just as part of the job, may I ask you boys a
question?”
“Sure,” Leonard said, “but would it be OK not to call us boys? It’s not that
I’m overly sensitive, but I’m getting a little long in the tooth to visualize
myself in short pants.”
Fitzgerald smiled. “All right. It’s a habit. We preachers get so we can’t
help calling every one boy, or son, or daughter. But the question was, are you
fellas Christians?”
“Well, you’ve put us on the spot,” Leonard said. “And the answer is no. For
both of us.”
Fitzgerald looked at me for agreement. I nodded, said, “Yeah. And no offense,
Reverend, but we didn’t come here to discuss religion. We just need to find
Illium Moon.”
“I’ve told you all I know about where he lives,” Fitzgerald said. “I’ve never
been to his place. I just know generally where it is.”
I didn’t believe that. I felt he didn’t trust our motives, and that he wasn’t
about to give out Illium’s address to a couple guys he didn’t know, and
infidels to boot. I respected that, but I still wanted to know where Illium
Moon lived. I was considering an approach when suddenly Fitzgerald waved a
finger at Leonard. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I didn’t think I knew the face,
but something was bothering me. It’s the name. Pine? You the nephew of Chester
Pine?”
Leonard assured him he was.
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“I’ve heard about you,” he said.
“Word gets around,” Leonard said. “And so do newspapers.”
“Yours is a family with problems,” Fitzgerald said.
“You might say that,” Leonard said. “But not of our own choosing. Actually,
far as family goes, taking or leaving—let’s make that leaving—a few
not-too-close and boring cousins, I’m all the family I care about. ’Cept Hap
here.”
“He appears to be a very distant relation,” Fitzgerald said, and smiled when
he said it.
“We couldn’t keep him out of the bleach,” Leonard said.
Fitzgerald looked at me and I grinned, way you do when you’re trying to let a
third party know you know the guy with you sees himself as a real card, but
you merely tolerate him.
Fitzgerald turned back to Leonard. He said, “Your uncle had a quick mouth
too. Like you. I didn’t like him.”
“That’s honest.”
“He came around with Illium from time to time. I had a few unpleasant
conversations with him.”
“About what?” Leonard asked.
“About God and religion,” Fitzgerald said. “He had a kind of cavalier
attitude about the subjects.”
“That was Uncle Chester, all right,” Leonard said.
“I assure you I wish no one ill,” Fitzgerald said, “but the Lord seems to
have made his statement with your uncle.”
“That didn’t have quite the Christian ring I’d have expected,” Leonard said.
“You sound a little too goddamned happy.”
“I prefer you not use the Lord’s name in vain,” Fitzgerald said. “Especially
in His house.”
“And I’d prefer you not malign my uncle,” Leonard said.
“Sincerely,” Fitzgerald said, “I didn’t mean to put it that bluntly. I
apologize.”
Leonard didn’t respond. He just studied the Reverend’s face. I said,
“Reverend. We didn’t come here for a fight, and I don’t see how we’ve gotten
into one. We got a couple questions to ask. That’s it, and we’ll be out of
your hair.”
“You’re not in a fight,” the Reverend said. “I’m suggesting, respectfully,
that you don’t use that kind of language here, and I’m apologizing for what I
said. I’m overly zealous sometimes. You see the things I see, hear the stories
I hear, you get so you want to crusade, do something about the badness out
there. Open the world up to God.”
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“All right,” Leonard said. “Apology accepted. And I apologize for my
language. Not because I think it matters, but because it is your church.”
“However you prefer to see it,” the Reverend said. “Listen, about your uncle.
Let me say a little more. I’m not happy about what happened to him. I merely
meant to point out that we all face judgment in the eyes of the Lord. Not just
your uncle, you and me as well. I’m suggesting only that we should all strive
to stand in the Lord’s light without blinking. I didn’t mean it the way it
sounded. Or perhaps there was some bitterness there. Your uncle was a witty
man, and quick with a quip. He seemed to have a special hatred for religion.”
“Hypocrisy is what bothered him,” Leonard said. “Not religion.”
Reverend Fitzgerald refused to be baited. He was very pleasant when he said,
“It’s unusual that your uncle and Illium Moon were such good friends. Mr. Moon
is quite religious. Very involved in church activities. Especially those
dealing with youth. And considering what I’ve read in the papers . . .”
“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” Leonard said.
“Very well,” Fitzgerald said. “I’ll keep that in mind. You know, I’ve been
sitting here trying to recall what I’ve heard about you, Mr. Pine, and now it
comes back to me.”
“I hope it’s flattering,” Leonard said.
“You’re a homosexual and you flaunt it,” Fitzgerald said.
“I don’t wear Easter hats and high heels and study floral arrangements,
that’s what you mean,” Leonard said, “but I don’t hide out in the kitchen
under a chair either.”
“You take pride in it,” Fitzgerald said.
“You’re no one I have to answer to,” Leonard said.
“No,” Fitzgerald said. “You don’t have to answer to me. The Lord is who you
answer to. I’ve nothing against you. I’m merely saying, your way is not the
way of the Lord. Are you acquainted with your Bible, Mr. Pine?”
“Me and Hap here were just quoting Bible verses on the way over.”
“Are you familiar with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah?”
“Yep,” Leonard said. “It’s a favorite Baptist queer allegory. I just get cold
chills all over when I hear it. Which is pretty often. I especially like where
Lot’s wife gets turned into a pillar of salt.”
“You know the story, then learn from it, sir. Lot met the angels of the Lord
at the gates of Sodom and took them to his house for a feast, and the house
was soon surrounded by homosexuals who wanted to know them.”
“‘Know them’ means ‘fuck them,’ right?” Leonard said.
Fitzgerald batted his eyes a couple of times but pretended not to hear and
plowed ahead. “And the homosexuals gathered around Lot’s house and demanded
that he bring the angels out and give them to the crowd, and the angels struck
the crowd blind. Does that sound like tolerance for homosexuals, Mr. Pine?”
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“All right,” Leonard said, “you didn’t get to the pillar-of-salt part, but
you left out some good stuff. Like how Lot, wanting to protect these angels
who needed no protection, offered his daughters to the crowd. Now there’s the
exemplary father I’d like to have. ‘Hey, girls, we got these guests the queers
want to screw, but, well, hell, they’re angels and they haven’t finished their
chicken-fried steaks, so I’m gonna give them you instead. Shuck your panties
and hit the porch.’”
“You have an unfortunate turn of phrase, Mr. Pine,” Fitzgerald said. “The
problem you have is not dissimilar to that your uncle had. And for that
matter, I’ve had. Yeah, even preachers can have a crisis of faith. But in time
it came clear to me. What you’re doing is what I was doing. You’re looking for
God to operate on human levels. Forget that. God lays down the law, and the
law is there, and it’s not for us to question. It makes no difference if it
seems just in our eyes or not. It is the law, and that is the long and the
short of it.”
“Religion’s not the question here,” I said, “and we didn’t mean to get off on
it.”
“It’s always the question,” Fitzgerald said. “Mr. Pine, be proud now, for
when you leave this world of the flesh and meet your Maker and you are cast
down into the fiery lava pits of hell, your pride will fail you. Rationale
will fail you. The law is the law.”
“Now I know why you call this church primitive,” Leonard said.
I thought:That’s warming him up, Leonard. That’s playing the game. Only way
we could have made a worse impression was if we’d come in with our pants off
swinging our dicks.
“Sin is a primitive act,” Fitzgerald said. “Our beliefs here are as basic as
I’ve stated. They’re not to be debated, because they are the law and the law
is made by a Judge wiser and more powerful than we. In time, in the hereafter,
we’ll understand His judgments. And if not, that is not ours to consider. It
is our job to obey the law of God. It’s that simple. And if there was ever a
time we needed the laws of God, it’s now. Look what this world is coming to.
Forget the world. Look right here. We have a tremendous drug problem right
here in LaBorde, Texas. Especially right here in the black sector. Kids
sticking poison in their veins. Children prostituting themselves for money and
dope. Did you know that many of the mothers here in our black community are
unmarried? Their children are illegitimate?”
“I’ve heard that rumor, yes,” Leonard said.
“They don’t see that as sin, Mr. Pine. The world says that’s OK. Fornicating
is acceptable. These girls, children really, as young as thirteen and
fourteen, have produced baby boys conceived by lust and born of the bile of
sin. And who is to take care of these children? The children who bore them?
What sort of future will they have? The children of children.”
“What you need here is something practical,” Leonard said. “Not more
religion. Lessons in birth control and disease prevention are the ticket.”
“That doesn’t stop the sin,” Fitzgerald said. “The act itself. Sex out of
wedlock. Abstinence is what’s needed.”
“That’s all right too,” Leonard said. “But for those who don’t plan to
abstain, they need rubbers.”
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Fitzgerald took a deep breath, but when he spoke, he was as patient as ever.
“That’s exactly the problem, Mr. Pine. Tolerance. Too much tolerance. There
will be punishment for those who sin against God. That includes you.
Homosexuals will not enter into the House of the Lord. Ask God to forgive you
for the perverse things you’ve done with other men. Turn your life over to
Him.”
“I ain’t gettin’ down on my knees for nobody,” Leonard said.
Fitzgerald turned his attention to me. “What about you, Mr. Collins?”
“Hey, I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“You have to believe to be saved,” Fitzgerald said.
“I’ll think it over,” I said. “Who knows? I might be back.”
Fitzgerald smiled politely. “Well, it doesn’t seem I can be of much aid to
you gentlemen, in the areas of the spiritual, or with directions. I’ve told
you all I know about Mr. Moon’s address. Somewhere off Calachase Road.”
Fitzgerald put his hands on his desk as if to rise. “I’d really like to get
back to my workout, now.”
* * *
Outside, where the church lawn met the lawn of the little blue house, a huge
man stood in the yard. He was over six feet, wearing gray cotton work clothes
and his skin was black as sin and everything about him was big and tight and
round, as if he were made up of boulders carefully stacked. In fact, there may
have been enough of him there for a mining claim.
He was moving the sprinkler and hose, and when he did, little boulders ran up
his arms and crunched and ran back down again. His mouth was open and he was
studying us. From a distance, he seemed to have very small teeth. He wasn’t
concerned that the water from the sprinkler was spraying all over him. He
watched us as we went, and may have watched us after our backs were turned.
Out in the parking lot, I said, “That went well, don’t you think? Seldom have
I seen two people warm to each other so quickly.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “Bet me and Fitzgerald ride together to the next
Baptist convention.”
17.
East Texas weather, being the way it is, by the time we got back from the
church to the house, ready for lunch, it changed. Before we could get mustard
plastered on our ham sandwiches, the hot, blinding sunlight was sacked by
hard-blowing clouds out of the west. They swept down black and vicious and
brought with them Zorro slashes of lightning and lug bolts of rain.
The rain fell cool and solid for two days, hammered the house, churned pea
gravel out of the driveway, broke loose the packed red clay beneath, and ran
it in bloody swirls beneath the porch and on either side of the house to
collect in the sun-burned grass like gore in a crew cut.
The rain was so constant the birds quit hiding. You could hear them singing
and chirping between flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder. Not a good
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sign. It meant the rain would continue, and most likely for some time.
Outside, except when lightning zippered open the sky, it was black as the high
stroke of midnight on a moonless night.
On the second day of the rain, late afternoon, I glanced up from readingThe
Hereafter Gang by lamplight and looked at Leonard’s hard profile framed before
the living-room window. He had pulled a hard-backed chair there and assumed
the position ofThe Thinker, elbow on knee, fist under chin. He was observing
the rain, and I watched as a snake tongue of blue-white lightning licked the
outside air above and beyond the bars and strobed his skin momentarily blue.
Inside the house, the air became laced with sulfurous-smelling ozone, and I
could feel my hide and hair crackle like hot cellophane.
Leonard looked at me. “You told Florida to stay home?”
“Sure, but she listens way you listen. Not at all.”
“Then she ought to be here pretty soon?”
“If she didn’t run off in a ditch.”
Earlier, bored out of my mind and tired of working on the flooring with
Leonard, I’d braved the storm with a flimsy umbrella and gone over to MeMaw’s
and used her phone and called Florida at her office.
Turned out Florida was doing almost as much business as a nun in a
whorehouse. She wanted to come by and eat supper with us. I tried to talk her
out of it, the weather being like it was, but she told me she was coming
anyway and she’d bring a big Pepsi. I wondered if that was some kind of bribe.
I left MeMaw’s after being happily force-fed a slice of fresh cornbread
slathered in butter, and waded back to the house through ankle-deep water that
flooded down the street and tried to trip me.
Back inside and dried off, I looked at my watch and calculated when I had
talked to Florida and told her not to come and she’d told me she was coming. I
computed the normal rate of travel from her office to Uncle Chester’s, doubled
it because of the rain.
“She doesn’t show in a few minutes, I’m going to look for her,” I said.
“Then I’ll have to go look for you,” Leonard said. “You drive for shit in bad
weather.”
“You’re brooding, Leonard, my friend. What’s the problem?”
“I blew it with Fitzgerald.”
“I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit. It was more like a
nuclear disaster.”
“Just can’t stand shits like that guy, hiding behind the Bible and a church,
judging everyone’s got a view doesn’t fit tight with his.”
“All you had to do was hold your tongue for five minutes and we’d have known
where Illium’s house is. I think he knew exactly where he lived, but he didn’t
entirely trust us. After we got what we wanted, you didn’t like the Reverend,
we could have soaped his windows or shit on the lawn. Actually, I thought the
old boy was pretty polite. He’s at least trying to deal with his community’s
problems, and I guess religion is a better way than nothing. Truth is, you
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were itching for a fight.”
“Have me shot, will you?”
“Not the first thing you’ve fucked up. I can think of all kinds of stuff.”
“Thanks, Hap.”
“Seriously, pal. Reverend’s not the only one knows where Illium lives. It’s
not like he’s hiding. We’ll find him when the rain stops.”
About ten minutes later, I heard a car sluicing through the rain. I went to
the front door and opened it. The rain was like a steel-beaded curtain hanging
off and all around the porch. It slammed the ground with a sound like ball
bearings. The wind was the coolest it had been since last fall.
I could see car lights in the drive, and they were all I could see. They went
out, I heard a door slam, a black umbrella and a yellow, hooded rain slicker
split the curtain of water, and Florida was on the porch, her beautiful face
staring out of the slit in the slicker hood. She grinned and held the umbrella
down and shook it and collapsed it and leaned it against the wall next to the
door.
“Hi,” she said.
“You should have stayed home,” I said.
“Good to see you too.”
We went inside.
“Hello, Leonard,” Florida said.
“Florida,” Leonard said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t get out in this. We been
worried.”
Florida slipped off her raincoat, and I hung it on a wood-frame chair by the
door. She had on laced workboots, blue jeans, and a loose-fitting plaid shirt
with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Under the coat she had been carrying
a cloth bag. She sat it on the seat of the chair and spread the mouth of it
and pulled out a three-liter Pepsi and a bag of those vanilla cookies Leonard
likes.
“Hap told me you were nuts for these,” she said to Leonard.
Leonard got up and took a look. “He’s right. Thanks.” He hugged her.
“You know I’m sorry how things are,” she said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “Thanks.”
“First time I haven’t seen you in a dress, Florida,” I said.
“I was doing office cleaning,” Florida said. “I felt like grubbies. Make us
some cocoa or something, Hap. I don’t think I’m ready for Pepsi.”
“It’s coffee or tea or slightly curdled milk warmed on the stove,” I said.
“Take your pick.”
“That curdled milk sounds good,” Florida said, “but guess I’ll go for the
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tea.”
I made us a pot of tea, and we were sitting at the kitchen table drinking and
eating cookies instead of having supper, when I heard another car come up in
the drive.
“Would you get it?” Leonard said. “I’m kind of comfortable next to the
cookies.”
“Yassuh, Massuh Leonard, I’s on it.”
I went to the door and opened it and a big shape in a black slicker mounted
the porch. He looked a little like the Spirit of Christmas Future. He pushed
back the hood of the slicker and smiled at me. It was Lieutenant Hanson.
“Come in,” I said.
Hanson slipped off the slicker, and I took it and led him inside. I hung the
slicker over a chair and let the water from it puddle on the floor. I said,
“Hey, gang, look who’s here.”
“Damn,” Leonard said, looking through the dividing space between kitchen and
living room, “if it ain’t Sherlock Holmes, and come all the way in the rain
just to visit. Can I hold your gun, sir?”
“No,” Hanson said, “but you can wear my badge a little while, you promise not
to lose it.”
Hanson and I went into the kitchen, and Hanson smiled broadly and said, “Hi,
Florida.”
“Hi, Marvin.” Florida had a pretty big smile herself.
“You two know each other?” I said.
“We’ve met a time or two,” Hanson said. “I’ve arrested a couple of her
clients.” Hanson nodded toward the cup Florida was sipping from. “That
coffee?”
“Tea,” Florida said. She smiled. Rather nicely, I thought.
I offered Hanson my chair and poured him a cup of tea and took my cup and
went over and leaned against the kitchen counter and watched him watch Florida
out of the corner of his eye. Watched Florida watch him for that matter. I
didn’t blame him, she was beautiful. And I didn’t blame her, Hanson was
powerful and charismatic and likable, if big and ugly and old enough to be her
father.
Hanson looked at his tea and said, “You got any milk for this? I like milk in
mine.”
“They just have curdled milk,” Florida said.
“I don’t like it that bad,” Hanson said. “What about sugar?”
“Would you like a rose in a vase to go with it?” I said.
“No,” he said, “but I’ll have some of those cookies.”
Leonard pushed the cookie sack at Hanson, a little reluctantly, I thought. In
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fact, I didn’t think he’d been sharing them all that well with Florida and
myself.
Hanson crunched a few cookies and sipped some tea.
“You got questions for us, Lieutenant?” Leonard asked.
“No,” Hanson said.
“Then you have something to report?” Leonard said.
“I do,” Hanson said. “I thought you might like to know the preliminary
forensic findings.”
“That’s awful chummy of you,” Leonard said.
Hanson shrugged. “I’m divorced. I’m lonely. And I got nothing better to do.”
“Why don’t I think that’s why you’re here?” Leonard said.
“You’re one suspicious sonofabitch,” Hanson said. “Your uncle’s house is
involved. Possibly your uncle. You found the body. I thought it would be only
fair I kept you informed.”
“Don’t pay any attention to Leonard,” I said. “He was raised in a barn.”
Hanson took a sip of his tea and frowned. He put the cup down, said, “We had
a forensics guy come in from Houston. He’s taken the bones back with him, but
he looked them over here, gave us a preliminary report. He could revise his
opinion somewhat, he gets a good look, but the forensics guy says the skeleton
in the box belongs to a nine- or ten-year-old boy. and he probably died of
severe trauma to the head. After that, the body was cut up to fit into
something small.”
“The trunk,” Leonard said.
“No,” Hanson said. “Originally, the body was in a cardboard box. On the bones
were paper fibers and remnants of a kind of glue found in cardboard. Could I
have some more tea?”
His cup was half-full, but I poured him some more.
“You’re saying the body was put in a cardboard box, then the box was put in
the trunk?” Leonard said.
Hanson shook his head. “Nope. There’s not enough remains of the cardboard in
the trunk for it to have ever been put in there whole. What about that sugar?”
I got Hanson the sugar bowl and a spoon.
“You got a longer spoon? You can’t stir good with these short ones.”
“No wonder you’re divorced,” I said. “And no, no teaspoon.”
Hanson stirred sugar into his teacup. He said, “The body was put in the
cardboard box originally, but by the time the bones were put in the trunk, the
cardboard had, for the most part, disintegrated. Some of the cardboard fibers
stayed with the bones. Another thing. The clay on the bones doesn’t go with
your uncle’s dirt beneath the house. The dirt found on the bottom of the
trunk.”
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“Then the body was moved from somewhere and put in the trunk?” Leonard said.
“And before it was moved, it had been in the ground for some time.”
“Looks that way,” Hanson said. “But that doesn’t let your uncle off the hook.
Sometimes a murderer kills in one spot, moves the body, buries it, then moves
it again. If your Uncle was sick, he might have thought about the body enough
he wanted to be near the corpse, went and dug it up. Put it here.”
“Uncle Chester wasn’t sick,” Leonard said. “That kind of thing isn’t sick
anyway, it’s sickening.”
“I’m not saying anything concrete about him,” Hanson said. “I’m just
speculating. We don’t even know this was a sex crime. It could have been
murder, flat and simple.”
“Does it matter?” I said.
“Yes,” Hanson said, “it does. It’s a sex crime, it may not have ended with
one victim. It was a murder, maybe a blow struck in anger, whatever, this
could be the whole of it.”
“Can the forensics guy tell from the skeleton if the child was sexually
molested?” I asked.
“No,” Hanson said. “Least not preliminarily, and I doubt later. Just not
enough left to work with. He did determine the child was killed some eight or
nine years ago.”
“The magazines in the trunk indicate a sex crime, though, don’t they?”
Leonard said.
“They point that direction,” Hanson said.
“Any take on the magazines?” I asked. “Were they buried as long as the body?
Seems to me, had they been, they’d have gone the way of the cardboard box.”
“Smart question,” Hanson said. “They were added to the trunk in bad
condition, but not bad enough to have been recovered with the skeleton when it
was moved from its grave to the trunk. They weren’t in the ground as long as
the corpse.”
“So you haven’t any proof this skeleton is tied in with the child
disappearances?” I said.
“Nope. Other than circumstantial. Leonard’s uncle talking about child
murders, a skeleton being found here. Children missing in the community over
the years. That’s it, really.”
“What do you think, Marvin?” Florida asked.
“I don’t know,” Hanson said. “It do be a puzzle, and I hate them. Agatha
Christie shit. Never can figure that stuff out.”
“Any chance I might see those files about the missing children?” Leonard
said.
“I don’t think so,” Hanson said. “What good would that do?”
“Seeing them, knowing my uncle like I did, maybe I might see something
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that’ll shed some light.”
“I doubt it,” Hanson said.
“Very conscientious,” Leonard said. “But sounds to me you could use all the
help you could get. I think maybe you might even be asking for help.”
“Well,” Hanson said, “the subconscious is a tricky sonofabitch, but my
conscious mind knows better than to bring a civilian in on this. To be honest,
after all this time, someone figures out exactly what happened here, even who
the child is, it’ll be an accident. That’s how most of this gets solved, by
accident. If it gets solved.”
Hanson tipped his teacup up and got up from the table. “Gentlemen. Lovely
lady, who I apologize to again for my past rudeness, and stupidity. I have to
go. I have work to do.”
“Tonight?” Florida said.
“Every night,” he said. “It’s either that or watch TV, so I take files home
and work.”
“Considering most of it gets solved through accident,” I said, “any of what
you do matter?”
“Very little,” Hanson said, “very goddamn little.”
18.
That night, with the rain heavy on the house, a sweat-cooled sheet drawn over
us, I held Florida in my arms and had the sad, dreamy sensation that no matter
how tight I held her, she would soon slip away.
I kissed her on the nose, and she opened her eyes and blinked and closed them
again, said softly, “Can’t sleep?”
“No,” I said.
“Horny?”
“Not really.”
She opened her eyes again and looked at me. “It’s the rain.”
“I guess so.”
“What’s the matter?”
“How are we, Florida?”
“What?”
“How are we? You and me?”
“We’re OK.”
“I mean, really?”
She eased out of my arms and raised up on one elbow. I couldn’t see her
features clearly in the dark. “We’re how we’ve always been.”
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“And how is that?”
“You’re not going to get complicated.”
“Maybe.”
“We haven’t been together that long.”
“Long enough for me.”
“The cliché is women are the ones who always want to get married.”
“I didn’t say anything about getting married.”
“But if we get serious, that’s what you mean?”
“I guess so.”
“Every guy I’ve dated has been ready to put a ring on my finger, Hap. A few
dates, especially if they get a piece of ass, they want to tie the knot.”
“I don’t want to hear about that part . . . dating. Is that what we’re
doing?”
“Yes, we’re dating. We’re fucking too, but that’s sometimes part of dating.”
“I thought we made love.”
“Oh, Hap. Don’t get technical.”
“Fucking’s technical. Making love is the same as the flow of a river. A cloud
in the sky.”
“Where in hell did you get that shit?”
“I think the big-cheese monk onKung Fu said it to Grasshopper. Ever watch
that? David Carradine didn’t know kung fu from shit.”
“Before my time. I’m twenty-nine.”
“No shit?”
“You think I look older?”
“No. I just thought you were older. Lawyer and all.”
“See, Hap, way it works, some of us go to high school, get out, go to
college, and in my case, law school, then go right into gainful employment.
Some of us.”
“Is there a hidden slight in that?”
“Some. Hap, I like you. I like you a lot. You’re funny. You’re a decent guy.
You’re not bad looking, and you make love beautifully. But you don’t strike me
as a secure bet.”
“You’re boiling it down to financial prospects. What happened to love?”
“I’m not in love—hear me, completely. But I could be. In love, I mean.
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But...”
“But what?”
“My mother married for love. My father married to be mothered. After I was
born, he decided he’d work when he wanted to. He had a college education, Hap.
He was smart. He was a sweet man. But my mother ended up working and
supporting him and me both, and every now and then, the time of year was
right, he’d work at a pecan orchard over by Winona. He liked to make just
enough for a six-pack or two before he came home. I love my father. But my
mother was miserable. Is love worth that?”
“Who says I’m going to lay around with my feet propped up watching TV reruns
while drinking six-packs of beer?”
“What’s your profession, Hap?”
“I do field work most of the time.”
“That’s not a profession. That’s a temporary job. Or should be. You’re in
your forties, correct? And right now you’re living off Leonard—”
“He lived off me for a while. Hey, listen. I pay my bills. I tote my load.
I’m not your father.”
“Maybe you aren’t. But I like ambition. I like someone who gets up in the
morning and has a purpose. A real purpose. I have one. I want whoever I love
to have one.”
“I always look forward to breakfast.”
“You dodge behind jokes too much too.”
“And you don’t listen to your heart enough.”
“My heart isn’t as smart as my head, Hap. And who says I can’t find someone I
love who has ambition and purpose? For that matter, maybe my heart isn’t
telling me what you want it to hear.”
“I’m not without ambition. I’ve just been temporarily derailed, that’s all.
Something will come along—”
“That’s exactly what I mean, Hap. You’re waiting for luck. Waiting to win the
lottery. Waiting for something wonderful to show up on the doorstep. You’re
not out there trying to make anything happen.”
“I’ve got enough money for now.”
“For now. And it’s not money, I tell you. It’s purpose. Ambition. You’d
rather coast.”
“And maybe it looks bad for a beautiful black lawyer to have a rose field
worker for a husband too. And I’m white. Let’s throw that turd out and dissect
it. Not once since we’ve been...dating, as you call it, have we gone out
together. Really out. You come here or out to my place, and we eat here and go
to bed and make love, and then in the morning you leave. You don’t want to go
to a movie with me, out to dinner, because someone might see you with a white
man.”
She rolled over on her back and looked at the ceiling. She pulled the sheet
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up tight under her chin. “I never said anything other than I had problems with
it.”
“So it boils down to I’m white, I’m lazy, I don’t have money, and I could
have a better job.”
“That makes it all sound so harsh. I don’t mean it that way. Not exactly. If
those things really bothered me, I wouldn’t be here.” Florida rolled over and
put her arm around me. “Are you really in love with me, Hap, or are you in
love with being in love?”
I thought that over. I said, “You’re right. I’m pushing things. Maybe I just
been lonely too long, like theYoung Rascals song.”
“Who?”
“Before your time. LikeKung Fu. ”
“Do you want me to go?” she asked.
“In this rain?”
“Do you want me to go in the morning and not come back?”
“Of course not.”
We lay quietly for a while. Then she said: “Hap, even though I’m a racist
castrating bitch that wants you to be better than you are, wants you to do
something with your life besides be a knockabout, do you think you could find
it in your heart, in your itty-bitty white man’s dick, to get a hard-on for
me? In other words, want to fuck?”
I rolled up against her, kissed her forehead, her nose, and finally her lips.
She reached down and touched me.
“Is that your answer?” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “I have no shame.”
19.
In the gray morning I awoke to the smell of Florida’s perfume and the dent
her head had made in her pillow. I had not heard her leave. It was still
raining.
After breakfast, Leonard and I went to work on the subflooring, our hammering
not much louder than the pounding of the rain on the roof.
We worked off and on until about suppertime. Then the rain quit and so did
we. We locked up and took Leonard’s car and went out to a Mexican restaurant
to eat, then decided to try and drive out to Calachase Road and see if we
could find Illium Moon’s place. That didn’t work, we’d do what you’re supposed
to do. We’d scout around till we found someone who knew where Illium lived.
It was still light, the summer days being long here in East Texas, but the
sun was oozing down over the edge of the earth, and the sky in the west looked
like a burst blood vessel. The air was a little cool and it smelled sweetly of
damp dirt.
Calachase Road is a long road of clay and intermediate stretches of blacktop
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and gravel. It winds down between the East Texas pines and oaks, and in the
summer the air is thick with their smell, and the late sunlight filtering
through them turns the shadows on the road dark emerald.
We drove around for a while, saw some houses and trailers, but no mailboxes
that said Illium Moon. We finally pulled up to a nasty shack that looked as if
a brisk fart might knock it over. It was gray and weathered with a roof that
almost had a dozen shingles on it. The rest of the roof was tar paper,
decking, and silver tacks. The tiles that belonged up there were in ragged
torn heaps beside the house, and leaning against the house was a crowbar and a
hammer. A couple window screens were swung free of the windows, dangling by
single nails. The front porch and front door were flame-licked black. There
was a healthy stack of beer cans by the porch that weren’t even damp, and it
had been raining solid for nearly three days. Budweiser was a major label.
Beside the house was a man. He was black and bald and bony and wore a T-shirt
that was stained to a color that wouldn’t be found on any paint charts. He had
on khaki pants with red-clay knees. His once-black loafers were colored with
red clay and gray something-or-other. He had a shovel and he was digging, and
he was somehow managing to hang onto a beer can while he did. He looked up
when we pulled into the yard.
We got out of the car and walked over to him. The gray something-or-other on
his shoes was immediately made identifiable by smell. Sewage.
Up close, we could see he had quite a trench going.
“Hello,” Leonard said.
The man looked at us. His face was boiling in sweat. He opened his mouth to
speak and revealed all his front teeth were missing. When he spoke, his
missing teeth made him sound a little like he was talking with a sock in his
mouth. “Shit, man. I thought y’all’s comin’ tomorrow.” He stood up and pushed
his chest out. “I know y’all seen them beer cans, but we ain’t no algogolic’s
here.”
Algogolics? What was that? An alligator with alcohol problems?
“You’ve got us confused with someone else,” I said. “We’ve just come to ask
directions.”
“Y’all ain’t from Community Action?” he said.
“Nope,” I said.
“Damn, that’s good,” he said. “I’m hoping to get them cans up.”
“What’s Community Action?” I asked.
“They come and see I deserve to have my house weather-proofed or not. It’s
for the underprivileged. Figure I tear a few more shingles off the roof, they
got to fix the whole thing instead of just spots, which is what they did last
time.”
“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “I doubt that dozen or so up there is worth
bothering with. I’d go with what I got. But I’d move the shingles in the yard
outta sight.”
“I’m gonna tell ’em the wind done it,” the man said. “There was some bad wind
with that rain. ’Course, I took ’em off ’fore the rain.”
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“That crowbar and hammer look suspicious,” I said.
“I’ll throw ’em up under the house,” he said. “Say, you fellas was Community
Action, seen my roof like that, would you fix it?”
“I’d be all over that sonofabitch,” Leonard said.
“That’s what I figured,” the man said. “Wish I hadn’t started taking them
shingles off ’fore it rained. Leaks between them tacks. Top of the TV’s all
fucked up. Run into the VCR and fucked it too, but I got it at Wal-Mart. They
take anything back and give you another. One time I wore some shoes a year and
took ’em back. You got to keep your sales slip, though.”
“Digging a new sewer line?” I asked.
“Naw,” the man said, swigging from the beer can and tossing it on the ground.
“I’m digging in the old one. I lost my teeth.”
“Ah,” Leonard said.
“Got so drunk last night I was puking in the toilet, and I pulled out my
bridge and flushed it. It’s here in the line somewhere, it didn’t go into the
septic tank. It’s in the tank, reckon I’m fucked.”
“Sorry about the teeth,” I said.
“They ain’t gone yet,” he said. “We ain’t flushed the commode since, so I’m
kinda thinkin’ them teeth’s here somewhere in the line. It runs slow.”
I looked at the line. It was a ditch seething with broken red sewer tile and
gray sludge. Flies pocked it like jewels.
“I don’t want to buy no new teeth,” the man said, “and I need to get ’em now
so I can flush the trapper. Damn wife shit in there a couple of times knowing
it ain’t supposed to be flushed. Can’t go in the house it stinks so much.”
I looked at the house and thought a little shit stink might actually give it
some charm.
“We wanted to know about someone might be a neighbor of yours,” I said.
“Shit,” the man said, “these neighbors ’round here are all motherfuckers. Our
house caught on fire and these motherfuckers didn’t even bake us a casserole
or a cake.”
“That’s cold,” Leonard said. “Listen, this guy may not be a main neighbor of
yours. He lives on this road.”
“This a long road, man.”
“Illium Moon’s the name,” I said. “Drives a bookmobile.”
“That motherfucker,” the man said. “Shit, he tried to come by here see we
wanted to read some books. I told him I got theTV Guide, and my wife can read
it, so what I need a book for?”
“TV Guidedoes hit the highlights,” Leonard said.
“That motherfucker’s crazy,” the man said. “He come by here ’nuther time and
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wanted to know I wanted to fix my place up with some scrap lumber he’s got.
Said me and him could do the work. Shit on that. Community Action, they use
new lumber and do the work too.”
“You know where this guy lives?” I said.
He pointed. “Down the road a piece there.”
“We been down the road a piece,” I said, “and we don’t know what we’re
looking for.”
“He has that van, one with the books, parked out ’side the house,” the man
said. “It’s white. And there’s piles of that old sorry-ass lumber and things
under tarps there. You didn’t see that, you just didn’t go down a good enough
piece.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Good luck with Community Action, and I hope you find your
teeth.”
“You do,” Leonard said, “what you gonna do with them?”
“Rench ’em off and use ’em,” the man said.
“That’s what I figured,” Leonard said.
“I’d do more than rinse them,” I said. “You ought to use a little Clorox to
kill germs, then rinse ’em in alcohol and then water.”
“I don’t go in for that nonsense,” the man said. “I ain’t never seen a germ,
and I ain’t never been sick a day in my life.”
“Okeydoke,” I said.
We left him there, poking his shovel around in the sewage. In the car,
Leonard said, “I know it’s an ugly thing to say, him being ignorant as a post
and all, but maybe, luck’s with the world, that shiftless sonofabitch will die
in his sleep tonight. He ain’t doing nothing but makin’ turds.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and his teeth are in them.”
20.
Red fingers of sunlight were all that remained of the day, and they clawed at
the trees on the horizon. By the time we found the place described to us by
the man with no front teeth, the sunset was still bleeding, but in the east
the full moon was out and clearly visible and the color of fresh coconut.
The man with no front teeth was right. We had not gone far enough. Illium
Moon’s place was a small cottage-style house set off the road. We recognized
it by the tarp-covered stacks we presumed to be lumber and by a mailbox across
from it withMOON painted on it in black letters.
To get to the house you had to go through an open gap in a barbed-wire fence
and over a cattle guard and down a muddy-white sand drive. The house was white
with a blue roof and shutters, and beside it was a little open carport that
sheltered a very clean-looking ’65 white Ford. The yard was impeccable. Out to
the far side of the house were several neat stacks of something with huge
gray-green tarps pulled over them. No bookmobile was visible.
We parked by one of the stacks and got out. I took hold of the edge of the
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tarp closest to me and pulled it back. Underneath was lumber on treated pine
pallets. The lumber on the pallets was used lumber, as the man with no teeth
had said, but it was good lumber and free of nails.
We knocked on the front door and waited, and no one answered. We walked
around the house and didn’t see anyone. Out back we walked a ways into a
large, recently mowed pasture. The pasture smelled sweet, like a fruit drink.
Off to the far left was a small, weathered-gray barn. From where we stood we
could see a little brown-water pond with a big oak growing by it, and behind
it, a long dark line of pine trees. The leaking sunlight visible above the
trees was like a fading flare.
As we walked out to the barn, grasshoppers leaped ahead of us. The barn door
was partially open and we went inside and called Illium’s name, but no one
answered. Inside it was stuffy hot, and there was a tractor and some equipment
and a few bales of low-quality hay. I was uncertain how much land Illium Moon
owned, but I didn’t get the impression he ran livestock. Most likely he had a
little cash crop of hay, and that was it.
Behind the tractor were two small piles under tarps. I looked under one.
Stacks of newspapers on pallets. Under the others were neatly stacked
cardboard boxes, and in the boxes were aluminum cans and plastic bottles. A
few things clicked around inside my head like Morse code, but they didn’t
click long, and I couldn’t decipher it.
We walked back to the house and stood on the front porch.
“No bookmobile,” I said, “and no Illium.”
“Let’s leave a note,” Leonard said. “Tell him I’m Chester’s nephew, see if
he’ll get in touch.”
Leonard went out to his car and got a pad and a pencil. He came back and
leaned the pad against the front door and started to write. The front door
swung open under the pressure.
“Open sesame,” Leonard said.
I peeked inside. It was a very neat house. The living room furniture wasn’t
new, but it was well cared for. The white walls looked to have been painted a
short time ago. There was no carpet, but there were some colorful throw rugs.
The blue-and-brown couch had plastic protection sleeves over the arms. There
was a cardboard box on the couch.
I called out, “Illium.”
No answer.
“He ought to lock up,” I said.
“Maybe he couldn’t lock up,” Leonard said.
I let that lay, and Leonard went in the house, and I went with him.
“We could get our ass in a crack for this,” I said, but we kept right on
looking.
We went through the house. Illium’s kitchen was even neater than MeMaw’s
place and smelled of some sort of minty disinfectant. The bedroom was very
tidy and the bed was made. The bathroom was neat except for the tub. It had a
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sandy ring around it and there were little hunks of damp hay. We went back to
the living room.
I looked in the box on the couch. There were magazines in the box. I saw
immediately by the cover of the magazine on top that it was the same sort of
magazine we had found in Uncle Chester’s trunk. I picked it up. There were
more magazines of the same ilk underneath. Unlike the magazines in Uncle
Chester’s trunk, these magazines weren’t as aged. They looked as if they might
have been damp once, but they were in pretty good condition. I said, “Uh-oh.”
Leonard was looking at them too. He said, “Yeah, uh-oh.”
Under the magazines was a pile of clothes. Pants. Shirts. Underwear. All
little boys’ clothes.
“A bigger uh-oh,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “We come by and Illium ain’t here and he’s left
the door unlocked and he’s got him a box of kiddie porn sitting right here on
the couch with kids’ clothes. Seems awful damn convenient.”
“Nothing says he couldn’t be stupid.”
We put the stuff back like it was and went out and closed the door. I used my
shirttail to wipe the door knob and wondered what all I’d touched in the house
besides the magazines.
“Let’s look in the carport,” Leonard said.
We looked in the old Ford first. Nothing there.
“Must be doing the bookmobile route,” I said. I turned then, and in the
corner of the carport, on shelves, were a number of large jars, and in the
jars there were little cuts of paper, and even though I wasn’t close to them,
I guessed what they were right away.
Leonard saw what I saw. He went over and got one of the jars and twisted the
lid off and pulled some of the pieces from the jar and held a handful out for
me to look at.
I’d guessed right. Coupons.
Leonard replaced the coupons and screwed the lid on the jar. “While we’re
snooping,” he said, “why don’t we look under those tarps?”
We checked under all the tarps. Under some was lumber, and under others were
mechanical parts of all kinds, everything from plumbing to automotive. Illium
seemed to be a neat pack rat. Maybe he used the stuff to fix up his house and
car, tried to be neighborly to folks like No Front Teeth down the road by
sharing his goods.
And in his spare time he cut hay and sold it and worked at the church and
free-lance drove the bookmobile, and in the evenings, after a hard day of
public service, he read child pornography with a young boy’s underwear
stretched over his head. It could happen.
We walked back to Leonard’s car and leaned on the front of it and we crossed
our arms and watched the sky grow darker and the moon grow brighter. Stars
were popping out. In the distance, the pond sucked up the moonlight and turned
the water the color of creamed coffee.
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“What the hell is it with the coupons?” Leonard said. “First, I thought Uncle
Chester had gotten to be a nut shy a pecan pie, but now I’m wondering. This
guy’s got the same thing going.”
“Hate to bring it up,” I said, “but another stretch of coincidence is kiddie
porn showing up here as well as your uncle’s. And there’s the fact they knew
each other, and were good friends. Lots of circumstantial evidence. It’s
beginning to look bad for a certain good friend’s relative, and I say that
with all due respect.”
Leonard was quiet for a time. He said, “Doesn’t matter. I believe in Uncle
Chester. He didn’t kill anyone, not a kid anyway. Someone fucked with him, he
might have killed them, but a kid, no way. And he wasn’t reading kiddie fuck
lit. There’s an answer to all this, I don’t care how it looks.”
I hoped so, for Leonard’s sake. I glanced down at the ground and watched the
moonlight silver the rainwater collected in a set of deep tire ruts in front
of us, ruts from the bookmobile, I figured.
Where was the bookmobile? Where was Illium? Did moss really only grow on the
north side of trees, and why did the Houston Oilers keep losing football
games?
I took a careful look at the ruts. They ran on out across the grass and hay
field. The grass and hay was pushed down, but starting to straighten slowly.
That meant the grass had not been pushed down too long ago, but with the rain
beating for a couple of days, it probably hadn’t had the chance to pop back
up. It would have taken this warm day and this much time for it to come back
to its former position. Those tracks had been made three days, four days
before.
I said, “Look here.”
Leonard and I squatted down and looked more closely. The night was bright and
we could see well. We also knew what we were seeing. Put us in a city and we
couldn’t hail a taxi, but we’d both grown up in the woods and had learned to
hunt and track when we were head high to a squirrel dog’s balls, so we could
read sign. Animal sign, or human sign. A paw print or a tire track, it was all
the same to us.
We got up and went across the grass and the mowed hay field. Another couple
days and the hay stubs and the grass would spring back up completely, and
there wouldn’t be any trail to see. Not unless you knew to look for it.
It didn’t take an expert in nanotechnology to figure where the ruts were
leading. They played out at the lip of the pond, and there were deeper tracks
in the bank where the vehicle had gone over. There were a couple of hardback
books in the mud by the water, and the moon rode on the pond’s brown surface
like a bright saucer. I could smell the pond, and it smelled of mud and fish
and recent rain. A night bird called from a tree in the distance and something
splashed in the water and rippled it, turned the floating moon wavy.
Leonard eased down the bank and got hold of one of the books and came back up
with it.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “The Old Man and the Sea.”
“No.How to Repair Your Fireplace. ”
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“Bound to have been a big run on that one,” I said.
I looked at the pond, then looked at Leonard. He said, “I’d go in, but I got
a problem with my leg.”
“I thought it was well.”
“Sometimes it gives me trouble.”
“Like now?”
“Right.”
“That figures. Look, we know it’s there.”
“For all we know, he run an old tractor off in there, or some drunk came
through the cattle guard and run out here in the pond thinking it was a
parking lot.”
“Sure,” I said.
I unbuttoned my shirt and tossed it to Leonard, stood on one foot and took
off a shoe and sock, switched feet, and repeated the process. I pulled off my
pants and underwear. I folded the underwear and pants together and tossed them
to Leonard and put the socks in the shoes.
“Aren’t you embarrassed undressing in front of a queer?” Leonard said. “All
you know, I might be sizing up your butthole.”
“Just call me a tease.”
I slipped down the bank and started to go in the water.
Leonard said: “Hap, be careful, man. We haven’t finished that flooring yet.”
* * *
The water was warm on top, but three feet below it was cold. The bank sloped
out and was slick. I went in feet first and slid down and under. The water
flowed over me, and I looked up and could see the moonlight shining through
the murk.
Going down the bank like that I had stupidly stirred up the mud, and a cloud
of it, like ink from a squid, caught up with me, surged over me and frightened
me. For a moment I was in complete darkness, then the mud thinned and I went
down deeper, feeling for the van I knew was there.
The water, though less muddy down deep, was darker. I wondered what ever had
possessed me to do this. We should have called the cops, let them look. I
should never have promised Leonard I’d help him out in this matter. I should
have finished college and gotten a real job. I wondered how long Florida would
remember me if I drowned.
The pond was not deep, and soon I could reach down and touch bottom with my
hands and feet. I crawled along like that a little ways, stirring mud, raised
up and swam forward, felt myself starting to need air.
I rose up swiftly in the blackness and hit my head sharply on something solid
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and nearly let go of what breath I still had; it was as if the water above me
had turned to stone. I swam left and hit a wall and something from the wall
leapt out and touched me and I kicked out with my feet and pushed backward
into another wall, and things jumped off it and touched me too. I clutched at
them and they came apart in my hands.
My lungs were starting to burn, and I couldn’t go up, and I couldn’t go left
or right. I pivoted and swam forward and hit a low barrier and reached above
it and touched something soft. I grabbed at it, held with one hand, and my
other hand touched something else.
Suddenly I realized where I was and what I was touching.
The back doors of the bookmobile must have been loose and popped open when
the van went over. That would explain the books on the bank; they had bounced
out when the vehicle went into the water, and due to the way the bank was
sloped, the van had landed at a slant with its rear end up, and I had
accidentally swum inside. The walls I had hit were the sides of the
bookmobile, and the things that had jumped off the walls were books.
What my right hand was touching now was a steering wheel. That’s what had
cued me. Tactile memory reaction. Common sense, something I seemed short on
these days, told me what my left hand was most likely touching. A
water-ballooned corpse. I made myself reach around and feel along what I
thought to be the face. I couldn’t tell much about features, nose, jawbone,
the like. The flesh was too swollen. After a few seconds, I’d had enough. I
jerked my hand away from the corpse but held to the steering wheel with the
other.
I was beginning to pass out from need of air. Black spots swirled inside my
head. It was hard to remember not to try and breathe.
I pulled myself over the seat and reached between the corpse and the steering
wheel to where the driver’s window ought to be. It was open. I yanked myself
through and shot up, surfacing like a dolphin at a marine show. The moonlight
jumped on me. The air was sharp, and I took in deep breaths that seared my
lungs.
I swam to the bank where Leonard stood watching. He leaned out and gave me a
hand and pulled me up. I coughed and shivered, said, “Next time, you go in.”
“The van down there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I believe Illium Moon is too.”
21.
“I think we should go to the police,” I said. “Talk to Hanson.”
“Not yet,” Leonard said. “Let me think on it.”
My shirt was still damp from dressing while wet, but it felt comfortable in
the close heat. I smelled faintly of pond water. We were back over on the East
Side, at a little, smoky black juke joint called the Congo Bongo Club, having
a beer. Well, Leonard was having a beer. I was having a nonalcoholic beer. The
place served them, but they seemed embarrassed about it. The bartender, who
was also the waiter, kinda slunk over and put it on the table like a patient
giving a pretty nurse a urine specimen.
The lights in the joint were not too good. Most of what light there was came
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from red-and-blue neon beer signs at the bar and the blue-white glow from the
jukebox. In fact, it was so dark in the back of the place you could have
pulled your dick out and put on a rubber and no one would have known it. It
wasn’t the kind of place had a no-smoking section either. The cigarette and
cigar smoke was thick enough to set a beer glass on.
The joint smacked of fire hazard. If there was a rear exit, you probably had
to go through a back office to get to it. A fire started here, the office was
locked, and the front door got blocked, you could kiss your charred ass
good-bye. The music on the juke was great, however. John Lee Hooker.
We were trying to figure our next move. Or Leonard was figuring our next
move. I was wondering what the cops did to you if they found out you had
discovered a body in a pond and went away and didn’t tell them. I was certain
dire consequences hovered above the question. I had already spent some time in
prison, and I didn’t want another stretch. I wasn’t even crazy about a small
fine.
“There’s things here don’t jive right,” Leonard said, “but I can’t put my
finger on the problem.”
In the glow of the jukebox, I saw a big black man eye-balling us from a table
across the way, throwing back beer like water. Actually, he was eyeballing me,
as carefully as a birdwatcher might a rare yellow-throated two-peckered brush
warbler. I suddenly realized just how white my skin was. Maybe we’d have done
better to have picked up a six-pack at a convenience store.
I didn’t say anything to Leonard, as the faintest hint of intimidation made
his dick hard, but I kept my eye on the guy.
We shouldn’t have gone in the Congo Bongo anyway. In my old age it seemed I
was becoming less wise and cautious. It was supposed to be the other way
around. Maybe, after forty, a kind of self-destruct button kicks in.
“I don’t know for a fact there was a body in the van,” I said, blinking away
tobacco smoke. “It just seems likely, because it damn sure didn’t feel like a
bundle of books I was touching. Question is, if it is a body, and it is
Illium, why is he in the pond?”
“Bad driving?”
“That’s not high on my list. Seriously, Leonard.”
“Suicide?”
“Actually, I thought of that one. Don’t get pissed, but let me throw out a
theory, OK?”
“Toss it.”
“Say your uncle and Illium met and took to one another like flies to shit,
discovered they had something in common. They liked little kids, and not to
pet on the head.”
“I see this coming.”
“Say your uncle did kill the child under his flooring. Killed him somewhere
else and brought him back to the house.”
“To play with?”
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“I’m trying to be delicate here.”
“That don’t mean you ain’t thinking it.”
“Illium and Uncle Chester find they both like this kind of thing, and Uncle
Chester likes to show Illium what he’s got in the trunk under the floorboards,
and they share a few magazines, and let’s say when your uncle dies, Illium
begins to feel guilty. . . . No, let’s say lonely. I mean, this isn’t a club.
You can’t go to Child Molesters United and find a bunch of guys like you.”
“Way I understand it, it ain’t as hard as you think.”
“So Illium misses your uncle. Gets tired of looking at the kid fuck magazines
by himself, just sitting around in the house, waxing his well rope—”
“So he gets all dewy eyed, puts his box of pornography on the couch, and his
kid’s clothes, possibly acquired from murders he’s committed, or my uncle’s
murders if Illium was just a fantasizer, and he says, ‘Good-bye, cruel world’
to his box of toys, jumps in the bookmobile, runs off in the pond and drowns
himself.”
“It’s a theory.”
“It sucks, Hap. It sucks the big ole donkey dick. I don’t buy any of it. And
what’s with the coupons? And you know that book I picked up on the bank? It
had a mark in it that’s in the copy ofDracula Uncle Chester gave me. A black
circle with a red heart on the inside.”
“It’s my turn to say that’s nothing. They were friends. Makes sense Illium
marked the books he loaned that way, and your uncle got one.”
“Yeah, and my uncle left me a safety-deposit box containing a book with that
inside, and some coupons, so maybe it means more than it seems like it ought
to. The coupons seemed nuts until we found those coupons at Illium’s, now I’m
beginning to think Uncle Chester was trying to tell me something.”
“And he left you a painting,” I said.
“Yeah, and there’s that,” Leonard said. “And if he was trying to tell me
something, why didn’t he just write it down and explain it? Or get in touch
with me and tell me? Why the code business? What’s it all mean?”
“I’m afraid Hanson’s right,” I said. “This is starting to sound like Agatha
Christie shit, and I don’t know from puzzles. They make my head hurt.”
“Reckon we need Miss Marple?”
“Could be she’s coming over right now,” I said.
The big black guy who’d been watching strolled over to our table. Well, not
exactly strolled. He listed a little. He’d had just the right amount of beer.
I sized him up, looking for striking zones just in case it wasn’t his
intention to discuss politics or summer fashion.
He stopped at our table, said to Leonard, “What the fuck you doin’ in here
with this honkie, brother? You trying to get a job promotion? This ain’t no
honkie place.”
Leonard leaned over the table, said, “He’s talking about you.”
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“Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “You see,honkie is a very derogatory black term for
whites,” Leonard said to me. “You see, stuff likepeckerwood, ofay, andhonkie,
it’s very insulting. It’s like whites calling usnigger orcoon orjungle bunny.
”
“No shit?” I said.
The big black guy glared at me, said, “You ain’t never heardhonkie before,
motherfucker?”
“He’s sheltered,” Leonard said. Then to me: “Motherfucker,Hap, is a common
term meaning you fuck your mother. Even if you don’t fuck your mother, folks
say it anyway if they’re mad at you or want to make you mad. It’s designed to
be derogatory.”
“I see,” I said.
“You cocksuckers best quit fuckin’ with me!” the big black guy said.
“Cocksucker,” Leonard said to me, “is a common term—”
“Cut it out, you motherfuckers!”
A lot of folks were looking at us now, wondering how much blood would be
involved. The jukebox wrapped up its tune and the air went silent with the
threat of murder.
The bartender said over the bar, softly, “Clemmon, ease off, these fellas
just come in for a drink.”
“I ease off I want to ease off,” said the big black guy.
I glanced out of the corner of my eye at the front door. About twenty steps.
Five, if you were leaping.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, showing more confidence than I felt, “I’m not bothering
you.”
“You come down here and slum with the niggers, is what bothers me,” said the
big black man. “You white pieces of shit always lookin’ down your noses at us.
Come in here, smart-mouth me. It’s gonna get you hurt. I bet you think I’m on
food stamps.”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said.
“Well, I ain’t. I own my own business.”
“Congratulations,” I said, “but I’m warning you, go on about your business.
’Cause you fuck with me, tomorrow your relatives will be splitting up your
belongings.”
“What’s that mean?” the big man said. “What the fuck you talkin’ about?”
“He’s threatening to kick your ass plumb to death,” said someone at a nearby
table.
“Appreciate that translation,” I said.
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“You’re welcome,” said the man at the table.
It finally registered with the big black guy that he was being insulted, and
the game was over. He reached for me.
I batted his hand to the inside with my palm and raised out of my seat and
hooked my other arm behind his head and dropped down quick with all my weight,
brought his head into the edge of the table, sharply. The bottles on the table
jumped and fell over. I slammed the guy behind the neck with my forearm and he
came down and met my knee and rolled over on the floor and made a sound like
he might get up, but didn’t. He lay there in a ball and tried to look
comfortable. I was glad he was drunk.
Leonard stood up. A lot of folks were standing up. I heard the click of a
knife opening nearby. I picked a fallen bottle off the table and held it by
the neck. Some of its contents ran out and splashed on my shoe. I reached in
my pocket with my free hand and got some money and put it on the table. I
wished I was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a serape. A damp shirt and
pants would have to do, though.
The bartender said very softly, “Go ’head on and leave, boys.”
I turned and looked at him. He was a little jet-black man wearing a white
shirt with black bow tie. The neon throbbed colors on his shirt. He was
holding a sawed-off pump shotgun, gauge of twelve. He wasn’t holding it
tensely, just showing it off. If he’d thought it through, he’d probably loaded
it with slugs. You let down on it, you cleaned out fewer innocent customers
that way.
“We were just leaving,” I said.
“I thought you was,” he said. “Don’t forget the tip.”
22.
When we got back to Leonard’s place, Florida’s car was parked in the drive
and she was on the porch sitting in the glider. It was a bright-enough night I
could see she was wearing some kind of cartoon character T-shirt, blue jean
short-shorts and big wooden shoes that reminded me of miniature pontoons. She
looked cute as a new puppy.
Next door there was the usual activity of drug selling, and I could hear
Mohawk’s, alias Strip’s, alias Melton’s, voice above everyone else’s. When
Melton got excited, his vocal cords achieved a kind of shrill quality, like
something oily was trying to crawl up his ass and he was liking it.
“Not a real good place for a lady to hang out this time of night,” I said to
Florida.
“They think I’m inside, I bet.”
The way the glider was positioned, the shadows, that was possible, but I
still didn’t think it was a good idea. Guys like the ones next door knew we
were gone, saw her car over here, they might decide to investigate.
“You’ll promise me you won’t do this again, though, won’t you?” I said.
“I promise,” she said.
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“Want to come in?” Leonard asked her.
“No,” she said, “I’m going to steal Hap from you. I’m taking him on a
picnic.”
“Picnic?” I said. “This time of night?”
“I been waiting since dark,” she said. “I’m hungry. And I don’t care if you
just ate dinner, we’re picnicking, and you will eat. I made the stuff myself.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I don’t mean to be rude,” Florida said to Leonard, “stealing Hap off and not
inviting you, but—”
“That’s all right,” Leonard said, hanging his head and pretending to be sad.
“I have a TV dinner, meatloaf, I think, and they’re having aThree’s Company
rerun marathon on channel nine. I wouldn’t want to miss that. And right before
it, there’s an hour ofThe Brady Bunch. ”
Florida giggled sweetly and Leonard raised his head and smiled.
I said to Leonard, “We’ll talk later.”
“I want to sleep on a few things anyway,” Leonard said.
“Pretty mysterious, you two,” Florida said.
“That’s us,” Leonard said, “The Mysterious Duo.”
I got in the car with Florida and she drove us out Highway 7 East. I reached
in the back for the picnic basket, an official wicker one with handle, and she
said, “Uh-uh.”
“I just wanted to know what we were having on this picnic,” I said.
“It’s a surprise. You find out as you eat it. But I bet you can guess what
dessert is.”
“Is it chocolate colored and sweet and shaped like a taco and you keep it in
a warm place?”
“My God,” she said, “The Amazing Kreskin. Come over here and ride bitch, big
boy.”
I slid over next to her and she smelled sweet and delectable. She said,
“What’s that cologne, Hap? Frog and Pond?”
I slid away from her. “Do I smell that bad?”
“Get back over here,” she said. “Always did like a man smelled faintly of
frog. Maybe you’ll tell me how you came by that aroma?”
“Maybe,” I said, and slid back and kissed her softly on the neck.
We continued until we came to a turnoff that announced a Scenic Overlook. The
idea of an overlook in East Texas, especially if you’ve ever been to Colorado,
someplace with mountains, is pretty funny. What it means here is a high hill,
and not all that high.
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We drove up there, and at the top were a couple of concrete picnic tables, a
chained-down metal trash receptacle, and a whitewashed chain that ran between
thick white posts that designated the area.
We got out of the car, and I carried the basket over to a table. Florida put
her arm around me, and we walked to the chain barrier and looked down. You
fell, you’d go almost six feet before you were in a pasture. Not exactly scary
or breathtaking. But the deal was this: Here, on this hill, you looked
straight out, there was a big V in the usual line of trees, and you could see
a long ways, and the trees in the distance, especially now at night, looked
like blue and purple mountains, and above those trees, the stars were like
glitter being poured into a funnel. Directly overhead, it was so clear the
stars seemed close enough to snag with a butterfly net. The air was
invigorating.
The depression I was feeling after the rush of adrenaline from discovering
the body in the van and the brief bar fight was subsiding.
“This is nice,” I said.
“Yes, it is,” she said, and hugged me tighter. “You can see forever itself
from here.”
“You come here a lot?”
“Now and then. An old boyfriend in high school showed it to me.”
“Never mind. I’d rather not hear it.”
“He was an astronomer-to-be,” she said. “He was interested in the stars.”
“Right,” I said.
“Well, he did have a theory or two on black holes.”
“Ha. Ha.”
She laughed. “I’ve never been here when someone else was. Not yet. I’ve
always had it to myself.”
“Good,” I said.
A shooting star flamed across the sky and snuffed out. We oohed and aahed it.
Damn, what a day. A nude swim. A dead body. A bar fight, and now a picnic
with a beautiful woman, and a shooting star. What next? A UFO encounter?
The picnic basket contained barbecued chicken, egg salad and ham and cheese
sandwiches on wheat bread, and sweet pickles and hot peppers and chips and
potato salad.
“That’s a lot of food,” I said.
“Figured an old guy like you might need to recharge himself later.”
“Honey, I look at you, I don’t need any jumper cables.”
We put the food on paper plates and ate and drank sweet tea out of a large
thermos. There was another thermos with coffee; when we finished eating, I
reached for it, but Florida stopped me. She said, “After dessert.”
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She stood up and took off her shorts and she wasn’t wearing panties. She put
the shorts on the picnic table. She slipped off her shirt and she wasn’t
wearing a bra.
“You saving on laundry?” I said.
She put the shirt with the shorts. She moved up close to where I sat on the
stone picnic bench, and I kissed her belly button. She pushed away from me and
smiled and gathered her clothes and walked back to the car. She looked funny
and sexy wearing nothing but those big shoes. She opened the back door and sat
on the seat with her legs outside and unfastened her shoes and put them on the
floorboard. She crossed her legs and looked at me. “Do I have to write you a
letter?” she said.
“Don’t even need to send a telegram,” I said, and I got up and went over
there.
* * *
Later, we dressed and had coffee while we lay on the hood of the car, our
backs against the windshield. We must have seen a half-dozen shooting stars.
“This was a nice surprise,” I said. “I especially liked the part where you
shucked your shorts.”
“Glad you liked it, but could I say—without intent to hurt your fragile male
ego, because I enjoyed myself very much—you seem a little distracted?”
“I’ve had a big day.”
“Hap, I’ve been thinking, and I got to tell you, what I said the other
night—”
“That’s all right. I was pushing.”
“What I mean is, I really don’t have the right to judge you. You are who you
are, and that’s a pretty good thing. I shouldn’t try and make you something
else.”
“You made some good points. I am coasting.”
“I suppose another thing is we haven’t had time to know each other that well.
One day I see you and you’re this grungy guy, and the next day I see you
you’re on top of the house sucking in your stomach—”
“You noticed that?”
“Sure. And then we’re in the sack, and I like you. I like you a lot, and I
don’t really know who you are.”
“What do you want to know?”
“You don’t know me either. Not really. Let me tell you something about
myself. Something to clear the air a little. I’m laying on you how ambitious I
am, right? Telling you what a ball of fire I am, and what a wet ball of twine
you are. So let me be honest. I’m not living up to my ambitions either.”
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“Maybe no one does.”
“It was my plan to be a serious criminal lawyer. I wanted to try murder
cases. I wanted to specialize in cases dealing with blacks, helping them get
fair trials in a white world. The whole nine yards. But I’ve settled for
divorce work and a little ambulance chasing. I’ve been in that shitty office
of mine for three years, and half the time my clients don’t pay me, or if I
get a percentage of something, it’s not a percentage of much, and I haven’t
made one bit of real difference in the world, and I thought I’d make oodles.”
“Everyone starts somewhere, Florida. Hell, you’re young. You’ll build into a
bigger career.”
“I’ve got to be willing to do that, though. You see, I found out most of the
people I was dealing with, defending, white or black, were guilty. If they
weren’t guilty of the crime they were up for, they were guilty of two others
they got off from. Most of them were guilty as hell.”
“That could have just been your experience so far. There’re bound to be
innocent people who need you.”
“Yes, but I was trying to get guilty people off. Trying to find loopholes.
And I’m disillusioned with people. Not just the crooks I’ve dealt with, people
in general. Not long ago there was a murder near here, over in Mud Creek. A
husband lost it and shot his wife and two kids and even the dog.”
“I remember.”
“People talked about the crime for a month or so. A lawyer friend of mine was
assigned to the case. She proved the murderer was insane. She told me people
asked her about the case all the time, and you know what she said their most
common question was about what happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“What kind of dog was it? Yeah. What kind of dog? Like the people didn’t
matter. But if it was a cute dog, then we’re talking tragedy. How could
someone think that way?”
“You’re running idealism up against reality, Florida. It happens to everyone
eventually. But don’t think the two aren’t compatible. I’ve been through that
myself.”
“Point is, I’ve lost a lot of my ambition this last year or so, and just that
stupid thing about the dog had a lot to do with it. What I’m saying, Hap, is
who am I to cast the first stone? And another thing. You’re right. I am
nervous about being seen with you because you’re white—”
“You never denied that.”
“But that’s not an excuse. I’m going to change.”
“Hot damn, you’re gonna take me to a movie.”
“Yeah, but you have to wear gloves and a bag over your head.”
“It’s a start.”
“I don’t think of myself as prejudiced, but when I was a little girl we lived
briefly up North. My mother had gone up there to stay with relatives. She left
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my father for a time, and she thought, up there, out of the South, she had a
chance to do something without skin color mattering. That was in New Jersey.
Well, there wasn’t much more in the way of jobs there, and the relatives we
were staying with were living in a white section of town and had been for a
couple of months, and one morning we woke up with snow on the ground and a
cross burning in the yard. Burned into the yard with gasoline was the
wordnigger. We moved back here, and the relatives moved out of that
neighborhood and into a black one, and the whole idea of sanctuary, that there
was somewhere you could go where there wasn’t any prejudice, any racial
hatred, was gone.
“It made an impression, Hap. I don’t blame all whites for the stupidity of
those people who put up that cross and burned those words into my relatives’
lawn, but it left something here,” she touched her heart, “that has to do with
me and white skin. I’m smart enough to know it’s a knee-jerk response at
times, and I fight against it, but it’s there, and what really makes me mad
is, late at night, sometimes I wake up bitter. Memories like that don’t go
away easy.”
“So now you don’t trust whites, and you don’t care to be seen with
them—romantically, anyway?”
“It makes me feel dirty. I even feel a little inferior a lot of the time.
Like I should be grateful I’m doing what I’m doing, and that I’m doing good
for a little colored girl from East Texas. I know better intellectually, but
emotionally, I feel maybe I am a nigger. That I’m second-best. I fight against
it all the time.”
“Do you feel dirty right now?”
“No. You don’t make me feel that way. In this setting. But we went out in
public, the old feelings would come back. I’m not saying I’m not willing to
fight them. I’m being honest. But they’ll come back. And maybe that’s OK, as
long as I confront them. All right. I’ve showed you my dirty laundry. Told you
stuff I’ve never told anybody. Now, tell me something about yourself. Help me
learn who you are.”
“I’m a guy who hopes he can show you there’s more to white guys than someone
who just wants in your pants. More to this white guy, anyway. I don’t deny
that getting in your pants is on my mind. I look at you and biology takes
over, and I’m enjoying the sexual aspect of our relationship, but I want more.
I’m not going to push you on the matter, but I want you to know that.
“OK. Enough on that. Let’s see. What else? I’m a college dropout. I was a
draft resister during the Vietnam War, and I’m proud of it. I stood up for
something and didn’t wimp out. Didn’t run off to Canada. Didn’t get religion.
’Course, there was a down side. I went to prison for refusing to step forward
at the induction ceremony. I did eighteen months. Let’s see. What else? I was
married. The woman made a fool out of me, even after we were divorced. She was
like catnip to me. She waved her butt and I followed. She nearly got me and
Leonard killed once.”
“What?”
“I’m only going to talk so much about this right now. Later, maybe I’ll have
more to say. But the gist of it, without being too specific, is I let her pull
us into something I should have known better about. A way to make quick money,
easy. Only it wasn’t easy. Leonard knew it was a dumb idea and he told me so,
but I was headstrong, and he went along with it anyway, because of me. Ended
up my ex-wife, Trudy, got killed and I got injured, and Leonard got his leg
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hurt bad. He was lucky it healed up the way it did. They thought for a while
he’d lose it.”
“My God, Hap. . . . That explains those scars you’ve got?”
“Some of ’em. So, I’m an ex-con and I nearly caused my friend to lose his leg
because I couldn’t keep my dick in my pants.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You’re right. I’m giving myself too much credit. It wasn’t my dick leading
me around. It was some foolish vision of true love. I used to believe in that.
Sometimes I still do. Maybe that’s what sapped my ambition, there not being
any true love. Though to be honest, before Leonard got hurt, I wasn’t exactly
a ball of fire either.
“Trudy and prison could be blamed, but I guess finally, you always got to
blame yourself. I let my idealism get stepped on, and I began to think it was
a sham, that there never was anything to it, because nothing ever changed. But
I’ve come out on the other side, now. I’m not ambitious, but I’m not lost
either. I’ve got my faith back in humanity, and it’s people like you that do
it.
“There’s bad stuff out there, but you look around, there’s good too. I’m not
saying I’m ready to wear flowers in my hair and tell everyone to just love one
another, but I do think things can be better than they are, and that each of
us, in his or her own way, can have something to do with making it better. I
also like blueberry ice cream, fluffy bunny rabbits, stuffed animals,
especially teddy bears, and cute shoes, if they don’t fit too tight.”
“You silly ass,” Florida said.
“Oh, one more thing. Earlier today, I found a dead body in a pond.”
23.
We got back to the house late and took the bedroom Leonard had left us. He
was asleep on the couch. We made love again and talked some more. I told
Florida all I knew about Illium Moon, about how we found the body. She thought
we should call the police. I did too. But Leonard had taken bullets because of
me, the least I could do was give him some time.
“You never heard any of this,” I said. “It comes up, except with Leonard, you
don’t know a thing.”
“Oh, Hap.”
“Not a thing, Florida.”
“That poor man . . . down there.”
“He don’t know he’s up or down. Another day isn’t going to matter.”
We finally snuggled and fell asleep, and I dreamed.
And in this dream I was under water. Down there in the bookmobile with
Illium, but I could see clearly this time. It wasn’t as dark as it had
actually been. Uncle Chester was there too. They were swollen and spongy and
their faces were no longer black. They were the color of damp oatmeal. Illium
was sitting behind the wheel. He had a jar of coupons. Beside him, on the
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passenger side, reading a paperback copy ofDracula, was Uncle Chester. I was
in the back, leaning between the seats, watching them. They didn’t seem to
notice I was there. I looked over Uncle Chester’s shoulder. He was reading the
part ofDracula about the “Bloofer Lady,” the vampire child murderer. I could
read it clearly, even though the words were gibberish, hieroglyphics at best.
Illium unscrewed the lid on the jar in his lap, and the jar filled with water
and the coupons floated up and out, paraded before him like small, wafer-thin
fish. He plucked one of them between his fingers and put it back in the jar.
He grabbed another, and another, but as fast as he put them in the jar they
floated out. Uncle Chester turned and looked at Illium. He shut the book and
held it in one hand. With the other he reached over and clutched at the
floating coupons. He helped put them in the jar, and still they floated out.
The process was endless. Illium and Uncle Chester grabbing the coupons,
putting them in the jar, and the coupons floating out.
I turned to the back and there was a trunk in the van, and the lid was up. It
was Uncle Chester’s trunk. I looked inside. There was a little black boy in
there. Nude. His eyes wide open. His lips formed the wordsHelp me, but I
turned away.
On the opposite side of the van, mounted on the wall, was the painting
Leonard had done of the old house amid the trees. The paint began to bead,
then bubble. The bubbles filled with colors of the paint and streaked down its
length as if crying Crayola tears.
I felt uncomfortable. Hot. I realized I was holding my breath. The back door
of the van was shut. I tried to open it. It wouldn’t budge. I turned and tried
to walk to the front of the van, but now I was swimming. I tried to ease
between Uncle Chester and Illium, make my way to the driver’s window, but it
was closed. I was growing weak, dizzy. I grabbed at the window crank and
attempted to roll the window down, but the crank wouldn’t work, and now Illium
and Uncle Chester had hold of me and were yanking me back. I twisted and tried
to fight them. Their faces were more puffed than before. Their eyes poked from
their heads like peeled grapes. The little black boy was out of the trunk. He
swam between them, took hold of my shirt. His eyes were pleading. His hand
tugged at me. His arm came loose at the shoulder and floated up, but still his
fingers held my shirt. Then his other arm came loose at his shoulder and
floated to the top of the van. Then his legs. And finally his head. His torso
came down to rest on my chest, and his body parts bobbed all around me,
shedding flesh, leaving only the floating bones, the rib cage lying across me.
I tried to pull the skeletal arm and fingers from my shirt, but I was too
weak. The bony arm began to tug. Coupons swam by me. Illium and Chester Pine
leaned over me and smiled. The water turned murky. I felt as if I were
blacking out.
Then I woke up hot and mummy-wrapped in the covers. The moon was filling the
room. Florida had rolled to the other side of the bed. The moonlight was
mostly on her, and I was in shadow. I noted that the shadow made my skin dark
as hers. I untwisted the sheets and sat on the edge of the bed and took in
some deep breaths. After a while, I rolled back on the bed and took hold of
the sheet and covered Florida and myself.
I thought about what I had dreamed. It seemed pretty silly now. There was a
logical explanation for everything in the dream, but I felt my unconscious was
also trying to tell me something I’d overlooked all this time. I still didn’t
know what it was, but I thought I had hold of the edges of it, and if I kept
my grip, I might pull the rest of it into view.
I lay awake until the moon slipped away and the sun eased up, rose and gold
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and already hot.
* * *
Florida was still asleep, and so was Leonard, when I tiptoed into the kitchen
and started coffee. By the time the coffee was beginning to perk, Leonard was
awake. He came in wearing his gray robe and some grungy bunny-rabbit slippers.
You know, those silly things with the ears on them, white cotton tails at the
heels. Personally, I’ve always wanted a pair.
Leonard yawned, sat at the table. “Where’s Florida?” he said.
“Still sleeping. We were up late.”
“Contemplating the universe, of course. What’s this?”
He was pointing at his painting. After I got the coffee going, I had brought
it into the kitchen and propped it up in a chair. I had the copy ofDracula on
the table. I had a pencil and paper there too. I had drawn on the paper.
“I been thinking stuff over, Leonard. I believe I’ve come up with some
ideas.”
“Like what?”
I poured him coffee, poured myself a cup, and said, “I’m looking at this now
from your standpoint. Your uncle isn’t guilty. Once I could get myself to
think that way, I began to get some ideas. That’s all they are, though,
ideas.”
“Let’s hear them,” Leonard said.
“Your uncle was a fan of mysteries. He wanted to be a cop. He was a security
guard. He claimed to have information regarding child murders, and wanted to
have his own personal investigation with assistance from the police, but he
didn’t want them in complete control. We know from what Hanson said that the
child disappearances here on the East Side weren’t exactly given top priority,
and now, even if someone came in and wanted to pursue them, like Hanson, it’s
such an old case, it would still be a back-burner operation. We know too
racial prejudice most likely affected the conclusions of previous
investigators.”
“Bottom line, my uncle didn’t trust the police, but he saw himself as an
investigator. It was his big chance to solve a real mystery.”
“Let’s say Illium, who was an ex-cop, met your uncle through one of his
personal programs. Bookmobile, the recycling, whatever. They became friends,
and they began to investigate this business. I don’t know why they began to
investigate. Some little pieces of evidence got them curious, and they were
bored, and they went to it. Or they found the skeleton by accident, and your
uncle brought it here because he wanted to examine it, try and figure what
happened. Thing is, though, if he was investigating with Illium, and they were
serious about what they were doing, they must have made notes. But where are
they?”
“You’re right,” Leonard said. “Uncle Chester would have made notes.”
“Let’s hold our water there and back up. Your uncle began to lose it.
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Alzheimer’s, not enough blood to the brain, whatever, but he began to
experience problems. He got his will straight through Florida, left his stuff
to you. But his thinking continued to muddle. Say he couldn’t work on the case
anymore, and that just left Illium. Your uncle wanted this business solved,
but it was different now. His brain was melting. He couldn’t hold his
thoughts. I think that’s why you have that bottle tree out there. A part of
him knew there was something corrupt about, but he couldn’t remember what.”
“So he translated it as something supernatural?”
“Something evil. If he heard about bad spirits when he was a kid, it could
have come back to him as real, his mind messed up the way it was. He might
have thought he was actually doing something that could protect him. And in
clear moments he wanted to tell you about it, or write it down, but he
couldn’t remember long enough, so the things that were important to the case
became all the focus he had, and those things became symbols rather than
thoughts.”
“The coupons. The book. The painting.”
“In a way, he was giving you a mystery to solve, not on purpose, but because
those elements, those clues, were all that remained of his thinking on the
matter. He might not even have known what those clues related to anymore, but
they were important to him, and you were important, and he had enough savvy
left to put those items together and have them stowed away in a safety-deposit
box.”
“It really is Agatha Christie shit?”
“Let’s see what we got. The book,Dracula. I don’t think it means anything
particularly. I believe your uncle was thinking about Illium. Not directly,
perhaps. But the book had to do with Illium, and it merely indicates a
connection.”
“Illium has, or had, the notes, is what you’re saying?”
“Could be. If he did have them, I figure whoever left him the little present
of the kiddie pornography and the clothes found them and destroyed them. The
coupons, now. Both Illium and your uncle had them, and they seem important,
but not so important Illium’s killer took note of them. We certainly found
them easy enough.”
“Meaning, if they were important,” Leonard said, “Illium’s murderer didn’t
know they were.”
“Yeah. Your uncle gave some coupons to Florida to give to you, and he put
some in a safety-deposit box. Illium had coupons in jars. But what’s it all
mean? I haven’t come up with a thing on that.”
“The painting?”
“That one’s up to you, Leonard. Tell me about it.”
“I painted it when I was a kid, for my uncle. It’s of the old Hampstead
place.”
“It’s a real place?”
“Yeah. It’s behind the house here, back in those woods. I used to go there
now and then. The house was abandoned years ago. Hampsteads were white folks,
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and they owned all the woods back there. Used to be a couple hundred acres.
The black community ended right behind the house here, where those woods
begin. Guess it still ends there, but I don’t know if all that land’s still
owned by the Hampsteads. They may have sold some of it. I really don’t know
anything about it anymore. Just that the house was once a fine house, there
was some tragedy in the family, and they moved out, but kept the land and the
house, but didn’t attend to it. I been inside a couple of times. When I was a
kid. Climbed through a window. It was a pretty spooky place. I don’t even know
it’s still standing.”
“Better and better. Look here.” I picked up the pad and showed it to him. I
had drawn a series of little rectangles within a series of lines.
“I don’t get it,” Leonard said.
“First day we came here, I saw a composition notebook on your uncle’s desk. I
glanced at it. It had a drawing, or chart, or whatever, like this on it. I
didn’t think much of it. I thought it was just doodling. For all I know,
that’s what it was, but I suspicion it might be a note that didn’t end up with
Illium. After the cops came, it disappeared. I guess they have it. Maybe they
have more notes than we think, but I don’t believe so.”
Leonard studied the pad. I said, “I’m not sure I’ve remembered it exactly
right, but that’s close. Does it make you think of anything?”
“A floor plan with six rectangles in it.”
“My thoughts exactly. What about the rectangles?”
“Furniture?”
“I don’t think so. But leave that for a moment. If it is a floor plan, it’s
not to this house. Too many rooms. And the rectangles don’t correspond with
your uncle’s furniture at all. Do you see what I’m getting at now?”
“If the coupons connect. If the book connects. Then the painting connects, or
the location of it connects, and that location could go with this floor plan.”
“Right. We just don’t understandhow they connect. Now, what comes in
rectangles?”
“All kinds of things. A stick of gum. Books. He liked books, that could be
it.”
“Proportion throws that. The rectangles are too big to be books if this is a
legitimate floor plan.”
I hummed a few bars of the death march. Leonard’s eyes widened. “Graves,” he
said.
“Ta-da!”
“You mean under the Hampstead place?”
“Could be.”
“I’ll be a sonofabitch.”
“When Florida wakes up, she’s going over to see her mother. When she does,
you and I are going to go take a look at the Hampstead place.”
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24.
Late morning, a half-hour after Florida left, we entered the woods, Leonard
carrying a shovel, me with a flashlight clipped to my belt, my remembrance of
Uncle Chester’s diagram folded up in my pants pocket.
At first the going was easy, as the woods were made up mostly of well-spaced
pines and there were soft paths of straw to walk on, but soon the trees sloped
uphill and there were hardwoods, vines and brambles, and the pines grew
closer, and the going wasn’t so good. It was humid too, and the smell from the
pines and sweet gums became cloying, like being splashed with a bucket full of
cheap perfume.
We scouted around until we found a little animal path and made our way down
that. Traveling became easier. We startled birds and a deer. About an hour
later the trail trickled out at the edge of a little dry creek bed. We didn’t
cross. Leonard led along the edge of the creek and deeper into the woods. We
fought our way through the vines and brambles, and finally, thorn-torn, tired
and hungry, we broke into the section of woods that held the house hostage.
Leonard leaned on the shovel, “I was set up right here when I painted it.
It’s in worse shape now. I don’t remember a damn thing about the insides.
There were fewer trees around it then.”
The house was huge and had once been elegant. Two-story, with a porch that
went all around, lots of windows and a railed upper deck, now sagging, like a
dental plate hanging out of a drunk’s mouth. There were some fallen-down
outbuildings nearby and a tumbled-over rock well frame, and around the old
well vines twisted and young saplings sprouted.
Trees were growing close to the house, and it appeared as if they were
holding it up. An oak had erupted through rotten porch boards and was crawling
up the front of the place, poking a limb through a glassless window frame,
like a bully poking a big finger in a sissy’s eye. The house’s lumber had gone
gray as cigarette ash. At one side, a persistent hickory had grown to the
height of the house and was still growing, and in the process, one humongous
limb was lifting a corner of the roof as if tipping a hat.
We carefully mounted the porch, watching our step as it protested our weight.
A burst of birds exited a nearby window with a noisy flutter. I said, “Shit.”
“Just yellow-bellied finches,” Leonard said. “Not known man-eaters.”
The front door was still intact, but when I took hold of the rusted doorknob,
it budged only slightly before jamming. The hinges were rusted tight.
The window from which the birds had exploded was our next bet. Leonard kicked
out the few remaining fragments of glass and broke apart the wood trim that
had held the glass in the frame, and we climbed inside.
The room was large and decorated with vines and dust and a peeling, bubbled
wallpaper that had a faded design on it that must have been colorful and
jim-dandy about 1928. There was an old fireplace filled with trash from hunter
and/or hobo camps. A chicken snake, big enough to play a starring role in a
Tarzan movie, slithered quickly across the floor and disappeared in a gap in
the wood.
The first-floor ceiling was mostly gone, and you could clearly see the roof
was pocked with holes, and the shadowed sunlight through the gaps was like
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spoiled cheese oozing through the splits in a food grater. The flooring was
also gapped, and there were sections where it was bowed up and the boards had
popped and split from weathering.
We made it across and into the next room without falling through, and the
flooring there was better because the ceiling was complete and less water had
dampened it. The room was smaller and contained an old-fashioned chifforobe.
The wood of the chifforobe had swollen and cracked. There was a bird’s nest on
top of it, and dried birdshit streaked its sides. The wallpaper here was good,
and you could recognize the pattern as a series of pale green shamrocks.
In the next room, the kitchen, there was a black, dust-covered wood stove
with white porcelain facing, and a long table shoved up against the wall. The
table was weather faded but sound, with thick carved legs that terminated in
lion’s feet. Above the table, on the wall, the wallpaper—sick beige with no
pattern—had water-stained itself in an interesting manner. The stain was dark
and shaped like a face and there were darker dots on the face, like splash
marks, and the shape of the face was familiar.
Leonard said, “The Wallpaper of Turin, or rather, of LaBorde, Texas.”
“I read once about this Mexican gal saw Jesus’s face on a tortilla,” I said,
“but I think we got her beat here.”
“I don’t know,” Leonard said, “get tired of it, you can’t eat it.”
We went over to the table for a closer look. Leonard stepped back and glanced
down, said, “Check out the floor.”
I saw what he meant immediately. A large section of the floor we were
standing on was newer wood. It was dark, as if weathered, but it was, in fact,
treated lumber. About the size of a Ping-Pong table. You looked close enough,
you could see it was all of one piece. You might not have noticed it, you
weren’t looking for something suspicious.
I got out the floor plan I had drawn from memory. I said, “According to this,
if I recreated it right, and the basic design certainly fits this house, there
are no graves at this spot.”
“Yeah, but I think, good friend, we have just found the doorway to hell.”
We got off the square of flooring, and Leonard worked the tip of the shovel
into a corner of it and lifted. The square of wood creaked up. When it was
high enough, I grabbed hold of it and helped raise it. It wasn’t too heavy.
We pulled the section back and looked down. It was about three feet to the
ground. You could smell the dampness of the earth. The ground was packed down
there, as if it were well traveled.
I lay down on the floor, leaned over the edge of the gap, and looked
underneath the flooring with my flashlight. There had been a lot of new wood
put under there for support. About three feet to my left there was a metal
container about the size of a personal safe, pushed back against the rotten
wood skirting that went around the house. I flashed the light in the hole some
more, looking for snakes. I didn’t see any.
I climbed down there and got the metal box and handed it to Leonard. The box
was made of tin. It was like an oversized breadbox. It rattled when I moved
it. There was nothing but a slap-and-snap latch to keep you out of it.
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I climbed out of the hole and watched Leonard open the box. Inside was a
large Bowie knife, a small hacksaw, about a dozen child pornography magazines,
a purple tablecloth, two candlesticks, and two new white candles.
I noted something was sticking out of one of the pornography magazines, an
undersized page that didn’t seem to belong. I pulled it out. It was a page
from the Bible. The Psalms. I checked the other magazines. Each contained a
page from the Psalms.
“I’ll be damn,” Leonard said. “Read a little Psalms, whack off to kiddie
porn, read a little Psalms. That’s some combination.”
I unwrapped the purple tablecloth. It was stained in the center with
something crusty, and at either end there were white stains that were
obviously candle wax.
“Let’s slide the lid back on the floor,” I said.
“Aren’t we going to look down there?” Leonard asked.
“Humor me. I need it to stand on.”
We put the flooring back. We stood on it, and I ran a finger through the dust
on the table. I said, “The dust here is a lot thinner than the dust everywhere
else. Now, watch this. I think.”
I pulled out the purple tablecloth and spread it on the table. It fit nicely.
I took off my shirt and used it to pick up the candlesticks at their bases so
as not to leave prints. I put one at either end of the table where the cloth
had remnants of wax staining it. I shoved the candles into the sticks, tossed
the porno magazines on the table for the hell of it.
I said, “Is a picture starting to form?”
Leonard let it cook a moment. “It’s like an altar. And if that crusty stuff
in the middle of the cloth is what I think it is, could be what we have here
are sacrifices to a water stain of Jesus?”
“A water stain to some is but the face of God to others,” I said. “Remember
those idiots and the tortilla?”
“Well, it ain’t a ritual we done much at our Baptist church.”
“Not my church either, though I might have missed a couple of Sundays.”
I put my shirt on, and Leonard shoveled the flooring up again. We pulled the
section back, and I got down in the hole on my hands and knees with my
flashlight and waved it around. I saw a number of termite mounds. I unfolded
the floor plan and studied it with the flashlight. I felt certain I was close
in memory to Uncle Chester’s floor plan, if not dead on. When I thought I had
the plan in my head, I folded it up and put it away. I stood up in the hole
and said, “Give me the shovel and just hang tight a minute.”
I took the shovel and started crawling toward what I remembered as a
rectangle on the map. It was dark under there, but the trim around the house
was rotten in spots and pencils of light came through like laser beams.
I got to about where I thought the map indicated a rectangle, and looked
around. There wasn’t a mound there, but there was a slight depression about
two feet wide and four feet long. Water had run up under the house and filled
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it and the water had partially evaporated.
I put the light on the ground at an angle where it would shine in the
depression, and got to work. It was so low I had a hard time managing the
shovel, but I lay on my stomach and poked it in the depression and sort of
rolled the handle in my hands and flipped mud and dirt to the side.
About the fourth time I flipped the dirt, a smell came out of there that
filled my head and made me choke. It was so potent, I crawled back from it. I
must have called out too, because Leonard said, “You all right?”
“Come down here.”
A moment later Leonard crawled up beside me. “Shit, that’s stout. It’s
something dead.”
“Yeah.”
We worked our shirts off and tied them over our faces, and while Leonard held
the light, I crawled up to the depression and went back to work. I rolled a
couple of shovelfuls out of there and came up with something. Leonard put the
light on it. It was stuck to the tip of the shovel and I couldn’t move it out
of the hole.
Leonard’s voice was muffled behind his shirt. “Chicken wire.”
I edged the shovel beneath the wire and worked along the edge of the
depression and picked up another shovelful and came up with more dirt-plugged
wire.
Leonard said, “If I buried something and didn’t want animals digging it out,
I might put a little chicken wire over or around it. . . . Jesus, Hap. I don’t
think I can stand this stink for long.”
It was strong, shirts over our noses or not. I was beginning to feel dizzy
and ill. Another shovelful turned up some cloth, and the cloth ripped and
snapped on the end of the shovel, and I pulled the shovel over closer and
looked at the fragment. It was caked with mud and what I figured was lime. The
lime had faded the cloth, and I couldn’t tell much about it.
When I stuck the shovel in again and worked it back, I had a fragment of
bone. It might have been a piece of a rib. There was something clinging to it.
It looked like lardy chunks of flesh and cloth twisted up together. The smell
from it was so intense I thought I was going to pass out.
“Maybe it’s an animal bone?” I said.
“Yeah, and my dick’s a water snake.”
I dug around some more, and after a while I came up with what I knew I would.
A hard round ball of mud. Except the mud came off the ball, and it wasn’t a
ball at all. It was the top part of a small, dirt-colored skull.
“Sonofabitch,” I said.
I used the shovel to push all I had found back in the hole, then shoveled all
the dirt back on top of it.
“We better look around some more,” Leonard said.
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We moved back a few paces, away from the smell, and I got my map out and
Leonard held the light on it. We studied it, crawled around under there and
found some likely locations, and I poked my shovel in them.
Once I came up with a chunk of damp cardboard box dripping doodle bugs. In
another spot I came up with more chicken wire. Over near the front of the
house, just up under the rotten front-porch steps, we found an open grave
about four feet long and two and a half feet wide and two feet deep. It was
empty. I pushed at the steps with the shovel. They moved. They weren’t
attached to the porch. I also noted that the steps were made of newer wood.
I thought about that. Whoever had made this graveyard had fixed it so they
could get under here easy—through the trap in the kitchen or by sliding away
the front porch steps. I thought too about this empty grave. Could this be
where the skeleton in Uncle Chester’s trunk originally belonged?
“You looked hard enough, sifted through the dirt under here,” Leonard said,
“I got a feeling you might turn up more of what we found in that first hole.
In different degrees of disintegration.”
“I’ve had enough,” I said. “Let’s get some air.”
25.
We didn’t eat any lunch that day. When we got back to the house we took turns
showering. There didn’t seem to be enough hot water and soap to make me feel
clean. The smell from the grave was still with me. At least in my head.
While Leonard showered, I walked around the living room, nervous. I had put
on jogging pants, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes, and I took advantage of the
comfortable clothing to stretch and go through some Hapkido kicks in the
living room. I shadowboxed at the air. I side-kicked the couch hard enough to
slide it across the room.
After a while, Leonard came into the room. He had put on gray sweatpants and
tennis shoes without socks. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. We looked at each other
but didn’t say a word. He got one end of the couch and I got the other and we
moved it to the far wall. We moved some chairs around. We had a little room
now.
We started to spar, lightly, just tagging one another with control. We did
that until we were sweaty and tired and needed showers again. But we didn’t
shower. We got to work on the subflooring, and by late that afternoon we were
finished. During that entire time, we hardly said a word, just something now
and then about nails and boards and such.
When we finished, we sat on the subflooring for a while, sweating, letting
time go by. I broke the silence.
“It’s gone far enough, Leonard. I love you like a brother, man, you know
that. But Illium didn’t just drive off in that pond by accident. And under
that house . . . no telling how many bodies there are. Your uncle’s diagram is
probably just for what he located. Or maybe he put them there.”
“You’re back to that,” Leonard said, and he was angry.
“I’m not back to anything. I’m saying we don’t know. We’re not investigators.
It’s time we call in the law.”
“The law has been on this case for years, Hap. We’ve found out more in a few
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days than they have in all that time. Or rather my uncle and Illium found it
out and we picked up on it. We let Hanson in on this, he’s still got to mess
with the system. I don’t even think it’s purely a black-white thing anymore.
It’s more a thing makes the police force look stupid. Justice seldom overrides
embarrassment.
“But black-white thing or not, white people run this town, and they’re going
to be a lot more rested they think a nigger did it, and did it to little
niggers. That fits in with the general thinking and keeps it out of their
backyard. They don’t see anything black as being part of their immediate
problem, even the liberals.”
“Leonard, most likely, all things considered, a black man did do it. It sure
points that way. A white guy would have to be pretty clever to cruise around
over here and not get noticed.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t a black man. You’re missing the point. Way it stands
now, all we got to show the cops is certain proof my uncle killed those kids
and hid their bodies at the Hampstead place, and that this Illium fellow was
in on it. Shit, he’s got kid’s clothes and pornography setting on his couch,
just waiting for the cops to eyeball it. Cops see that, they aren’t going to
look any farther, and Hanson isn’t going to get the chance to look either.
They’ll have it all solved. Couple old dead niggers did it, or rather my uncle
did it and Illium got in on the business late. Case closed. And I ain’t having
it. Uncle Chester’s the one taught me about pride and honor. Taught me not to
care about color, one way or the other. Not to hide behind it, not to use it
to roll over nobody.
“I was growing up, you hear a crime newscast, read a newspaper, they were
always quick to point out when the criminal was a black, but not when they
were white. I got the impression it was blacks did everything. It was my uncle
showed me things straight. That people were people and there were good and
bad, and to just look at a thing head on, not try and dress it up any. And
that’s just a reverse way of saying it turns out to be a black man, it’s a
black man. That’s no skin off my ass. I just want whoever it is nailed. But I
don’t want to give the cops the easy way out. Uncle Chester was a good man,
Hap. He had honor. Me and him, we had our problems, but he wasn’t a child
killer. There’s no reason you got to believe in him, but I believe in him, and
I want to see he gets a fair shake.”
“Thing is, Leonard, whoever killed these kids and did Illium in is still out
there. Guys like that, they don’t stop. You know that. While we’re
investigating, he could be planning to kill another child. That’s who he’s
after. Kids. Illium only got aced because he got in the way, and somehow let
on he knew something.”
“I realize that.”
“That first grave we dug into. That’s fresh, Leonard. You know that. It
doesn’t take any time at all for a body to decompose. That one still had the
stink on it. He’ll kill again, and I don’t want that on my head.”
“And I don’t want my uncle’s reputation destroyed, and I don’t think the cops
are going to find who’s doing this anyway. Like I said, they got their
suspects. Uncle Chester and Illium. They’ll close the book on this case so
quick it’ll make your head swim.”
“I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
“Don’t say anything for a while. Don’t tell anybody.”
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“Leonard, I already told Florida about Illium.”
“Goddamn you, Hap!”
“She won’t say anything. For a while.”
“You shouldn’t have done that. We had a deal. That goddamn pussy always did
mess your thinking.”
“Watch it, Leonard.”
We sat there looking at each other like bad asses for a moment. Leonard
smiled slowly. “Hell, Hap, I love you, man. We gonna fight?”
“’Course not.”
“That would be some fight, you know?”
“I couldn’t take you,” I said.
“I don’t know. I think you might. You hesitate now and then, you think you’re
gonna hurt someone bad. You ain’t got that killer instinct, but you got mad
enough, you’d be some bad business all right.”
“I couldn’t get that mad at you, buddy.”
“Yeah, we’re stuck with one another. . . . Shit, Hap. It’s OK you told
Florida. Hell, I know you got a head on you. She’s all right. I mean, you’re a
dumb asshole, but what’s done is done, and she’s all right.”
“It just slipped out. A thing like that, it’s hard to keep under your hat.”
“It’s all right, bubba. It’s just I don’t know what to do exactly.”
“Me either,” I said.
26.
A few days went by. The recollection of those bodies burned my memories at
night, found their way into my thoughts during the day. It was the same with
Leonard. Not that he said much about it. But I could tell. I had known him
long enough to see his feelings expressed in the way he moved or smiled or
tried to laugh.
To flush the memories out we took to hard work. Manual labor has a way of
sweating out impurities. Both physical and emotional.
We finished up the surface flooring late one afternoon and took what scraps
of lumber were left over, and went to see MeMaw, dumped the stuff in her yard
and made a pledge to patch her porch.
She was agreeable and very grateful. She told us how much Jesus loved us and
took us inside and showed us our snapshot. She had pinned it on the wall near
the snapshot of her youngest son, Hiram, who she said Leonard reminded her of.
She said her boy would soon be home for a visit. When she said it, her entire
face brightened and she looked no older than seventy-five. OK, eighty-five.
I looked at the snapshot of her son and the one containing me and Leonard.
Well, Leonard and her son were both black, that much was similar.
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We had to eat some homemade bread and preserves before we were allowed to
consider leaving. It wasn’t a difficult task. We insisted she let us do a few
chores for her as well, then we left out of the kitchen and shoved the lumber
under her porch and vowed to be back to do the work in a day or two.
Back at Uncle Chester’s, just as the sun faded, Leonard put some water in a
pot of yesterday’s pinto beans, dropped in a fresh strip of ham hock, and
peppered it. While it stewed, I drove my pickup down Comanche Street to the
East Side Grocery for a few supper items. It was a beautiful death to the day,
and in the red and gray time before the dark, the East Side took on a sort of
fairy brilliance. A lot of walkers had disappeared from the streets for
supper, and those who had jobs were back from them and settled, so the streets
were near empty and stained with the blood of the sun.
East Side Grocery was a center for more than commerce. It was where the old
men gathered to rattle dominoes and cuss and tell about how they used to do
this and used to do that. A bunch of them were sitting out front of the
grocery, to the right of the door on the concrete walk, underneath an overhang
with a tin-capped light that was already on and already swarmed with bugs.
They were sitting on old metal lawn chairs playing dominoes on a fold-out
table, laughing and drinking beer out of paper cups.
Behind them, stapled on the store wall, there were ads for great black blues
musicians, like Bobby Blue Bland. Guys like that played the East Side often,
and the white community never even knew it. There was also a colorful poster
announcing East Side’s Summer Carnival, August 27th, the “Only All Black
Sponsored Major Carnival In East Texas,” if one were to believe the poster. In
addition, there were a variety of church and community project bulletins.
I nodded at the old men when I went in the store. They nodded and grinned
amiably enough, but even though I had been here a lot of late, there was the
usual suspicion on their faces, the unasked questions: Who’s the white guy?
What’s he doin’ here? Why’s he keep hangin’ around?
The store owner had been at the domino table, and he reluctantly followed in
after me and got behind the counter and waited. I picked up some bread and
eggs and cornmeal mix, a six-pack of beer for Leonard, and looked for some
nonalcoholic beer for me but didn’t find any. I got a six-pack of Diet Coke
instead.
I took my stuff to the counter, plucked a couple of jerky sticks out of a box
up front, threw them down with my purchase, and watched some hot links on
metal pins turn and sweat and drip inside a humidity-beaded glass enclosure.
The owner had a lot of belly and a lot of gray hair and a sun roof that
revealed a dark bald spot. He might have been five two. He appeared to have
all his own teeth, and one of the front ones was gold as Rapunzel’s hair. He
said, “That do you?”
“Yeah. How’s the dominoes?”
“I’m losing,” he said.
He tallied up my goods on the adding machine, and I continued to look around.
I examined a frame on the wall behind the register containing the first dollar
the store had taken in, and noted the dollar was play money. Below that, on a
shelf, I saw something that startled me. Next to a jar of pickled pig’s feet
was a larger jar stuffed with little slips of paper. It looked like one of the
jars at Illium’s.
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I said, “That jar with the coupons in it? That is coupons, isn’t it?”
He was bagging up my groceries; he stopped, glanced where I was indicating.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve seen that setup a couple times,” I said. “The jars, I mean. There
something to it besides you saving coupons?”
“That’s the church’s,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“Reverend Fitzgerald, he’s got him a deal with all the businesses in town. We
cut coupons, we see them. Folks bring them and donate ’em. Fitzgerald saves
them coupons for his youth programs. You know, take the soccer, baseball team
out to eat. He’s got this deal with damn near everybody in the city. Even if
the coupons expire, they let him use ’em. They gonna make money anyway,
discount or not, him bringing in ten, twenty kids at a time, and often. He’s
got more coupons than he can use. Illium done told us he gonna stop picking up
for a while, he gets this batch. He says they done gettin’ yellow, they got so
many. They could take soccer teams out for the next ten years and not run out
of coupons. He done s’posed to got this here jar, but he ain’t showed. I
reckon he’s been sick.”
Yeah, I thought, real sick.
“Mr. Moon’s the clearinghouse?” I asked.
“You know him?”
“Not really. Know who he is.”
“Yeah, he runs all manner errands for the church. He’s a real do gooder, that
Illium. That sonsabitch dies, he’s gone sit on the right side of Jesus, and
Jesus gone give him a juice harp, personal like, let him play a few
spirituals.”
I figured Illium was probably twanging out a rendition of “The Old Rugged
Cross” even as we spoke. I thanked the old man, paid up, and started back to
the house, thinking about Illium, the church, Reverend Fitzgerald, and all
those coupons, the connection right under our noses all the time.
* * *
Next day. A Saturday. Hot. Me and Leonard and Florida and Hanson, out at the
lake near my old house, standing on the bank, shadowed by drooping willows,
casting fishing lines in the water.
The fish weren’t biting, but the mosquitoes were. They were bad here because
of the low areas where the water ran out of the lake and gathered in pools and
turned torpid beneath the shades of the willows and gave the little bastards
prime breeding grounds.
Florida, dressed in blue jean short-shorts, a short-sleeved blue sailor-style
shirt, low-cut blue tennis shoes, and one of those stupid white fishing hats
with a big brim that turns up in the front, was doing more slapping than
casting.
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“You should have worn long pants,” I said. “I told you.”
“Well, damnit, you were right,” she said.
Hanson slapped a mosquito on the side of his face, hard. He looked at his
palm. In the center of it was a bloody mess protruding broken insect legs. He
wiped the palm on his pants.
“Boys,” he said, “this is just peachy-keen fun, but you didn’t invite me out
here to fish. I can tell way you keep looking at each other, so don’t fondle
my balls—sorry, Florida.”
“It’s OK,” Florida said. “I’ve heard of them.”
“Get on with it,” Hanson said. “And next time, skip this fishing shit and
take me to a movie.”
“I don’t know you’re gonna like this,” Leonard said, “’cause, you see, what
we want to do is make some kind’a deal.”
“I don’t like deals,” Hanson said. “It always means some guilty asshole gets
off with less than he deserves.”
“We’re not guilty of anything,” Leonard said.
“Except withholding evidence,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “there’s that.”
“All right,” Hanson said, reeling in his line, “that’s enough bullshit. . . .
You in on this Florida?”
“Nope,” she said. “I’m just a humble fisher girl. And their lawyer, if they
need me.”
We all took a moment to slap at a black cloud of mosquitoes. Hanson said,
“Let’s go someplace we can talk without pain. Few more minutes of this, I’m
gonna need a transfusion.”
We walked back to Leonard’s car, which was up the hill and in the sunlight.
The mosquitoes weren’t swarming there, there was just the occasional kamikaze.
We took the rods and reels apart and put them in the trunk of the car with the
fishing tackle. We poured the worms out so that they might breed and multiply.
I watched them squirm around in the soft sand, making their way into the
earth.
Florida climbed up on the hood of the car and stretched her legs and
scratched at the knots the mosquitoes had made. On her, even the knots looked
good. Hanson seemed to be taking note of that himself.
Hanson said, “I’m waiting. And not patiently.”
“Once upon a time,” Leonard said, “me and Hap found a dead guy in a pond.”
“Yeah,” I said, “in a bookmobile.”
“Come again,” Hanson said.
We explained about Illium but didn’t give his name or say where his body was.
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We didn’t tell him any more than we needed to. When we finished, Leonard said:
“It’s gonna look bad for the ole boy, things you’re gonna find on his couch. A
box of kid’s clothes and some kiddie fuck books. But it’s bullshit. He isn’t
guilty of anything. Neither’s my uncle. You see, all this is connected to
those missing kids, but it’s not connected the way it looks.”
“Another thing,” I said, “me and Leonard got to talking last night, thinking
about what we’d seen, and we came up with something else. In this guy’s
house—”
“The drowned guy?” Hanson said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You’ll find a dirty bathtub with pieces of hay in it. We
figure he’d just finished mowing his field, was grabbed by whoever while he
was in the bath, and drowned in his own tub. Then they put him in the van and
ran it off in the pond. An autopsy will probably show the water in his lungs
isn’t the pond water.”
We didn’t say anything else. We leaned against the car and waited. Hanson
looked at us for a while. “That’s it?” he said. “You’re not telling me any
more than that?”
“We’ll tell,” Leonard said, “but we want something.”
“You’re not in any position to want shit,” Hanson said. “It’s best you talk
your asses off.”
“You know we haven’t done anything,” Leonard said. “We want to solve this
crime, bad as you, but we want the deal you didn’t give my uncle. You help us
solve the case, but we lead.”
“I can’t do that,” Hanson said. “Department wouldn’t stand for it, a couple
of amateurs. Why do you think they didn’t let your uncle do it?”
“He was nuts?” Leonard said.
“Well,” Hanson said, “that was part of it.”
“We already got more leads than you on this missing child business,” I said.
“You might be amazed what we got.”
Hanson studied the lake in the distance. A soft hot wind brought the smell of
it to us. It stunk faintly of dead fish and stagnation. A large bird’s shadow
fell over us and coasted away.
Hanson said, “If I wanted to do it, I couldn’t. I tell my superiors, they’ll
laugh their asses off, me suggesting you guys run an investigation. They’d be
on you assholes like rash on a baby’s butt. They got through with you, you
wouldn’t know if you wanted to shit or go blind. And they’d stick me writing
parking tickets.”
“We don’t want you to ask them anything,” I said. “Not yet. What we want is
you to join up with us, and cheat a little. Show us the stuff you got on the
case, we’ll show you something. We think we know what’s going on, but we want
to set everything up, and the more we all know, the better. We see the files,
we might recognize something there goes with what we already know.”
“I’ve read those files,” Hanson said. “There’s not a whole lot of help
there.”
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“Something that’ll jump out at us,” Leonard said, “won’t necessarily jump at
you ’cause you don’t have the information we got.”
“Sounds like some shit talk to me,” Hanson said.
“This way,” I said, “when we turn it over to you, and nod out like we never
existed, no one’s going to know we did anything, unless you want them to.”
“Of course,we’ll know,” Leonard said, “and that’s all that matters.”
“You had all your ducks in a row on this,” I said, “you could make those
jackasses at the station stand up and notice, and you’d get the respect you
deserve.”
“Not to mention solving an important crime,” Florida said.
Hanson turned and looked at her. “I thought you weren’t in on this.”
“Just a wee bit,” she said. They held each other’s eyes longer than made me
comfortable.
“We’re deadly serious,” I said, drawing Hanson back to me. “We’ve got the guy
that’s been murdering these kids by the ying-yang, and now we’re gonna put it
in the wringer, crank it up a couple notches. You don’t help us, we’ll find
some other way to get it done.”
“I could just run your asses in for obstructing justice,” Hanson said. “And
ought to.”
“You could,” Leonard said, “but you don’t want to.”
“Say I don’t?”
“You want this murderer bad as we do,” I said, “and we can make things happen
a lot quicker if you do it our way. You help us, we get the benefit of your
experience, and you get to look like Supercop. Hell, aren’t you tired of being
neglected? You solve this, on your own, with our help, you might end up
chief.”
“And most important,” Leonard said, “those kids will have justice. Well, some
kind of justice.”
“I don’t know,” Hanson said.
“We start with the body in the pond,” I said. “Telling you who it is and
where it is. It’s not like we say, then to hell with it. It is, you play that
one any way you want, then we feed you some more. Tell you what we know and
how we know it and what we think it means. Then we’ll stick the killer’s dick
in the wringer and put your hand on the crank.”
Hanson crossed his arms, furrowed his brow, and looked into the distance. A
minute ticked by like it was an hour on holiday.
“What’ya say?” Leonard said.
“I’m thinking,” Hanson said. “Give me a minute to breathe here, will you? I’m
thinking.”
27.
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Some mornings the beautiful face of my ex-wife, Trudy, hangs over me like a
moon, but when I open my eyes there’s only the sunlight as seen through tears.
Some mornings the light itself is the color of her hair, and the smell of
summer flowers is the smell of her skin.
Some mornings I awake and the bed is too huge and I cannot remember how I’ve
come to where I am, cannot believe what happened to Trudy, or imagine that
beautiful body and face of hers in the ground, withering, feeding the bugs and
worms. I won’t allow myself to look straight on at the memory of violence that
took her and wounded me and Leonard. She went wrong and I went after her,
pulling my best friend behind. Gunpowder and bloodshed, sulfur and death were
Trudy’s final perfume. And me and Leonard, we’ve got the scars.
I awoke the next morning having dreamed that way about poor, pretty Trudy,
awoke feeling old and blue and not much for coffee. All this the consequence
of Florida not being in my bed. She had not invited herself to stay and I
hadn’t the guts to push it.
Her absence between the sheets had been part of why the old dreams of Trudy
came back; part of the feeling behind my bones and viscera that violence was
oncoming direct in my path, like bright lights on my side of the highway on a
dark, wet night; the feeling I was about to meet wet grillwork head-on,
followed by two hot tons of speeding steel.
I got dressed and went outside without waking Leonard and sat on the porch
steps in the cool of the morning and watched the sunlight brighten. Long about
the time you could call the morning golden, Hanson pulled up at the curb in a
car I had not seen before, a beige Buick with a dent in the rear fender. He
got out of the car with something under his arm and looked at me. He managed
his cigar out of the inside of his coat and put it in his mouth and came up to
the porch and sat on the step beside me. He looked tired. He rolled the cigar
with his tongue and put what was under his arm on the steps between us. It was
a thick manila folder.
“Glad you’re up,” Hanson said. “I was gonna wake you.”
“Thanks for giving Florida a ride home last night,” I said.
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
“That was damn nice of you.”
“No problem.”
“I like the idea of an officer of the law seeing her home safe.”
“Part of the job.”
We sat in silence for a while. Hanson shifted on the step so that he could
pick up the folder and open it. He looked at the contents for a few moments,
then put the folder on the porch. He said, “All right. We got a deal. I want
you to know, ’cause of you and Leonard, I almost lit this damn cigar last
night. Haven’t smoked in years, just sucked on it now and then, but I almost
lit it.”
“Thanks for the folder,” I said, and meant it. “And the world thanks you for
not lighting that damn cigar.”
“I photocopied all this shit last night, on the sly, and it gets out, well,
my job is gone, and I just might be sleeping behind bars. And you and Leonard
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will be there too. You can bet on that. Here’s how it’s gonna work. I’m gonna
leave you this, you give me the name of this guy in the pond, tell me where
the pond is. I got some lies ready to use for leads. I find him there, we’re
in business. I don’t, you are not only gonna give me this stuff back, I’m
gonna punch both of you in the mouth and see to it you’re out of town.”
“Before sundown?”
“Just as quick as the toe of my shoe in your asses will move you.”
I told him Illium’s name and where to find him. I didn’t tell him any more
than that.
“OK, son. Let’s see how we play the game.”
He got up, leaving the folder on the porch. He started down the walk. About
halfway to his car I said, “Marvin.”
He turned.
“I really like Florida,” I said. “A lot.”
“I know, son, but sometimes things don’t work out the way a man wants them
to. Ask me about that sometime.”
He finished off the distance to his car. He drove away.
* * *
I fixed coffee and breakfast and woke Leonard and showed him the folder. We
ate and cleared the dishes and spread the contents of the folder on the table.
There were a couple of photocopied snapshots of missing kids. Just a couple.
Both boys, and both staring at the camera, the way young kids do, like
startled deer.
One of them had his head shaved close and had ears that if he could have
moved them would have given him lift-off. He was the first reported to
disappear. It occurred to me that had he lived, he’d be a young man now.
The other boy was a nice-looking kid with a couple of front teeth missing. I
looked at those photographs hard. I wanted those kids to be real, not just
reflections on colored paper. I thought about the other kids. No photographs
available. While they were living, no one had bothered. It was as if their
existence was of no importance, no need for a matter of record.
We studied the material for a while. There was a lot of it, but it didn’t say
much. There were notes from the cops and detectives. Hanson had a few notes of
his own. The obvious thing was that one child a year had come up missing from
the East Side for the past eight years and had not been accounted for.
I said, “See any patterns?”
“All boys,” Leonard said. “All about nine or ten. All of them noted as not
having the best of home life, and in some cases, not being reported missing
until some time after their initial disappearance. Part of that might have
been the parents, and part of it may have been the sorry attitude of the
police force.”
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“What about when they were killed?”
Leonard studied the contents of the folder. After a while he said, “I’ll be
damned. Every one but one came up missing in August. Corey Williams was
reported last September.”
“Before you woke up, I did some figuring on that,” I said. “Taking in the
fact a lot of the reports came in late, they were probably all kidnapped
sometime in the early part of the last week of August. Personally, I think
that’s a little too big a coincidence.”
“This is August,” Leonard said.
“Yep. And week after next is the last week of the month.”
“So what’s with the last week of August?”
“I don’t know. It sounds like a pattern, but I also got to thinking about the
smell that was in that grave. That’s fresh, or seems to be. So maybe all this
late-August stuff is just coincidence and he got started a little early this
year, but I don’t think so. Stink could be due to slow disintegration. Soil
like that, sometimes it happens, something gets buried just right.
“Another thing that jumps out at me is all the children were illegitimate. No
fathers. The mothers were all teenagers. Couple of the kids had been shuffled
around to foster homes, had been in some kind of trouble almost before they
were out of diapers. Little robberies. Drugs. Stuff kids ought not to even be
thinking about. See the pattern?”
“I don’t know that’s a pattern,” Leonard said. “Not the way you mean, anyway.
Just shows they’re the type of kids to be at risk.”
“Well, we’ve already got our good Reverend in mind here, due to the church
connections, coupons, recycling—which explains all those goddamn newspapers
Uncle Chester had. And if you remember, Fitzgerald really had a hard-on for
illegitimate children. Do you recall anything he said that stuck with you?”
“It all stuck with me. . . . Yeah, when he was talking about the mothers of
illegitimate children, he said the mothers had produced baby boys. He didn’t
say girls, or children. He said baby boys without fathers. Something like
that.”
“It didn’t mean anything to me then,” I said, “not really, but I caught it.
What I think is, we got a religious nut serial killer. He’s somehow tied his
religion in with his sex and power urges. I don’t know, maybe something that
happened to him in his childhood.”
“Shit, Hap, I don’t give a damn what happened to him in his childhood. I
mean, he got fucked by his next-door neighbor who was a scout leader, I’m
sorry for the kid he was, but for the man he is, I don’t give a shit. He made
his own choice.”
“I don’t know some people have a choice, if certain things happen to them.”
“Cancer does what it does because it’s got no choice, but I get a cancer, I’m
not going to psychoanalyze the little bastard. I want it cut out. This guy’s a
cancer.”
“Even so, if we understand what drives him, we got a better chance of nailing
his ass. Obviously, he doesn’t care for illegitimacy. Gets him worked up.”
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“OK, Hap, I’ll play. He’s got a thing for boys, so he was maybe nine, ten,
when he was raped by a man. Good guess?”
“Probably a person of authority.”
“A preacher like himself? That what you’re driving at? Something that links
God, religion, sex, and abuse together.”
“If Fitzgerald was illegitimate, I wonder if he knew who his father was and
what his father did for a living? Preach, maybe? And think about the position
Fitzgerald’s in. It’s perfect. He’s trusted. He has access to children. He has
all these youth programs. Kids like the ones in this file, neglected, probably
not wanted, they’d be raw meat for this wolf. And I think this guy’s a
psychotic, not a sociopath. Or he’s both. He gets off on the power of
controlling the kids, and he thinks he’s doing God’s will. He controls them to
some extent through positive services. Baseball, soccer, what have you, but—”
“It’s not enough.”
“For certain illegitimate children, it isn’t enough. The ones that maybe
remind him of himself at that age. If he can control them, destroy them, he
can control his past, destroy it. At least for a year at a time.”
“But why a year? We’re talking a pretty perfect pattern here.”
“I don’t know.”
“OK, Hap. When he was nine or ten, he was raped by a man, his father maybe,
who was a preacher. Or he was raped by a preacher. If not a preacher, someone
in authority he trusted. It warped him. And he’s a religious nut. That your
track?”
“Yep.”
“OK. He’s tied fanaticism in with his deviance. That’s why there’s a page of
Psalms stuck in each of the porno mags we found. The two are linked with him.
Or maybe a part of him knows what he’s doing is evil, and somehow the Psalms
consecrate it in his mind. Say he’s a psychotic. That he’s killing for God.
Any of that’s true, it doesn’t take us one whit closer to nailing the bastard.
Let’s just try and put together the hard evidence, and you can play Freud on
your own time. Come on. What have we got?”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “I don’t know it’s such hard evidence. But
here’s what I think we’ve got, and what I speculate. Your Uncle Chester and
Illium were friends, Illium worked with the church. That’s why Uncle Chester’s
poor addled mind thought the coupons were important. He was trying to point a
finger at the church. The painting led us to the Hampstead place, and what’s
under it. We’ve already established what the book’s connection was.”
“Illium,” Leonard said. “And maybe with the title of the book, he was trying
to give us the nature of our criminal. Dracula ain’t nothing compared to this
guy.”
“I think your uncle and Illium, probably because of something Illium saw at
the church, got onto Fitzgerald. Perhaps the way he dealt with the boys in the
programs there, the illegitimate ones especially. And somehow Chester and
Illium connected him to the Hampstead place. Could be the good Reverend makes
a pilgrimage up there to worship the water stain or something, Illium
followed, watched from hiding. Fitzgerald went home to memorize his sermon,
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and Uncle Chester and Illium poked around and found the bodies. Six of them
anyway. I bet the other two are up there.”
“So my uncle took one of the bodies and hid it here while he and Illium did
their own investigation. Probably in case the old boy moved the remains.”
“That’s where they screwed up. They should have gone to the cops.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “and by not going, the body being found here, it just
helped give the Reverend a way out.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Your uncle loses his memory, dies, so he’s out of
the picture. Add Illium into the equation, dead at the bottom of his pond with
porno mags and kid’s clothes on the couch, and the Reverend isn’t going to
look as ripe for the part as he might have back then. So we have a lot of
circumstantial evidence. Is it enough?”
“Have you thought about this?” Leonard said. “Could be we just don’t like the
bastard, and we’re tying all this together the way my uncle got tied. It looks
bad, but are we seeing smoke or fog? Just because it all leads back to the
church doesn’t mean it leads to Fitzgerald.”
“I’ve thought about that,” I said. “I’ve also thought about the last week of
August coming up. I’ve thought too, we play our hand before we have the
evidence, the bastard could get off. He did, he wouldn’t quit doing what he’s
doing, but he might get more cautious doing it.”
“It’s not like he’s been sloppy so far,” Leonard said. “This has been going
on for years.”
“Kids like this, to some extent, they’re like prostitutes when they’re
victims. They’re considered expendable. Illegitimate black kids with no hope
and no future and no one to care. It’s easy to waste someone like that and not
get caught. And consider that the murderer started wasting them during a
period of police administration when views toward the ethnic community were
less than considerate, and are maybe still that way—”
“He could go on indefinitely.”
“Exactly.”
“Got a next step, Mr. Sherlock Freud?”
“We wait until Hanson finds Illium, then we tell him what we suspect. Tell
him about the Hampstead place and show him what we found, and see what he has
to say.”
“And in the meantime?”
“I guess we fix MeMaw’s porch.”
Leonard poured us another cup of coffee. He said, “Something else is wrong,
isn’t there?”
“Why do you say that?”
“I can just tell. Florida?”
“Yeah.”
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“She went home with Hanson last night, didn’t she?”
I looked at him. “You could see something too?”
“They had eyes for each other. You could kind of smell it too. His musk, her
in heat.”
“Thanks for being delicate.”
“Well. Did she?”
“I think she did.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“She’s a grown woman. She does what she wants.”
“Hey, she’s the one messing up here. You’re good people, Hap. It’s her loss.
Even if Hanson probably has a bigger dick.”
“Thanks, Leonard, that perked me right up.”
“Hey. We friends, or what?”
28.
It’s hard to deal with knowledge like that. Dead kids under a house, a killer
on the loose, and his prime time for new murder fast approaching, and then
there was the matter of my woman done gone off and left me for an older man,
and me and Leonard were building a porch.
Fortunately, the work we were doing was soothing. I had begun to like the
lumber, the feel and smell of it in the hot open air. I liked the sensation of
taking something weak and insubstantial and turning it into something solid
and pleasing. I liked helping MeMaw.
MeMaw looked rough that day, but she gave us a dentured smile and invited us
in for late-morning coffee. We drank it, even though we were already floating
in our own. We finished that up, she asked us to help her to bed, said she
felt weaker than usual and wanted to be perked for when her baby boy showed
up. We helped her out of the walker and onto the bed and Leonard covered her
with a light blanket and turned a fan on to circulate the warm air.
“Won’t our hammering bother you?” I asked her.
“Tired as I am, only one can wake me up is the Lord. And he gonna have to
shout today.”
“Rest, MeMaw.”
She looked so ancient lying there. Not like a person, but like a praying
mantis. All bone and tight-stretched skin. She was asleep before we could
leave the room.
We worked as quietly as possible, and long about noon, Leonard decided he
wanted hamburgers and fries and was going to use one of Uncle Chester’s
coupons to get it. I stayed to crawl beneath the house and pull out some old
lumber that was under there so we could take it to the dump. It had fallen out
from beneath the porch ages ago and was wet and rotten and an invitation to
termites.
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I was doing that when the porch above me squeaked like a sick rat. I figured
it was Leonard. I crawled back to the front of the house and out from under
the porch and stood up, ready for a burger. But it wasn’t Leonard. It was a
black man about my size and age, and I knew who he was immediately, though we
had never met. He has wearing a cheap blue suit and was looking at me like I
was a snake that had crawled out from under the house.
“Who are you?” he said, and he had the look of someone ready to fight.
“Hap Collins,” I said. “You’re Hiram, right?”
He eyed me for a second. “How’d you know that?”
“I’ve seen your picture. I’m a friend of MeMaw’s. Me and my buddy Leonard are
fixing her porch.”
“Where’d she get the money for that?”
“Doesn’t need any. She paid in pie.”
He grinned slowly, and when he grinned, damned if he didn’t have that
confident air Leonard’s got, like he’s immortal and knows it. MeMaw was right.
They did favor.
I stuck out my hand. “Good to meet you.”
“You too,” he said, and we shook.
“She’s sleeping. Said she was resting up for you. I didn’t know she meant you
were coming today.”
“She didn’t know exactly, but I called and told her it was likely. I always
come around this time of year. It’s my vacation time from work.”
He nodded toward his white van in the drive. I saw on the driver’s door the
stenciled wordsEASTEX SCHOOL SUPPLIES .
“That’s right,” I said, “you’re a salesman.”
“I can sell socks to a legless man, Hap.”
He certainly sounded as if he could. I said, “But you don’t sell socks to
schools.”
“Nope.”
“Pencils? Notebooks?”
“Nothing like that. They get that stuff at the drugstore. I carry stuff like
American and Texas flags, sell those on the spot. Take orders for flagpoles,
podiums, sweatshirts, senior rings. That kind of thing. Mostly it’s riding
around and talking and showing my teeth a lot.”
Across the street, Leonard pulled into the drive and got out with a greasy
white burger bag. He crossed over and nodded at Hiram. He said, “MeMaw’s baby
boy.”
Hiram grinned. “That’s me. You Hap’s friend?”
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“Gosh,” Leonard said, “I hate getting put on the spot like that.”
Hiram laughed like that was really funny. You could certainly see the
salesman in him, but he seemed like an all-right kind of cuss too.
“We can split this stuff with you,” I said.
“Naw, thanks. I reckon Mama’s got something in the box in there.”
“Just stuff that tastes like ambrosia of the gods,” Leonard said. “Can’t
figure why you’d want to eat that and not share our burger.”
“I got a strong character,” Hiram said. “I’m gonna tiptoe in here and check
on Mama. You boys take it easy. And thanks for doing this work. I wasn’t so
damn tired right now, I’d help you. I been driving all over. Come in from El
Paso today.”
“That’s on the other side of the world,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Say, Hiram,” Leonard said. “We’re gonna work a little more, then clean up
some of this lumber and stuff, then we’re gonna knock off a bit. We gotta run
in and get some nails, a few things to finish out.”
“Need money for it?” Hiram said.
“It’s on us,” Leonard said.
Hiram smiled at us and thanked us, and quietly went inside and closed the
door.
Way the world was, the things I knew about, it was good to see everything
wasn’t crazy. Good to be reminded sons still loved their mamas and came home
to see them. Not everyone had dead children under their house.
* * *
About two that afternoon, right after we’d come back from the lumber yard
with nails and stuff, Hanson pulled up in Uncle Chester’s driveway and got
out. He had the white cop Charlie with him. Charlie was wearing the same
sheen-green Kmart suit he’d had on last time, but he’d added a porkpie hat to
his outfit. Maybe to keep that pesky fly off his head.
Charlie stayed by the car, and Hanson walked across to MeMaw’s where we were
working.
“You boys got a moment?” he said.
We put up our materials and crossed the street and went into the house with
them. Before we could get seated at the kitchen table, Hanson said, “Charlie’s
in on it, boys. I had to have some help.”
I looked at Charlie. He looked the way he always looked. Calm, a little
bored, old-looking for his age, disinterested, dumb. I figured he was about as
dumb and disinterested as the proverbial fox. When we were seated, I said,
“OK. How’d it go?”
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“Well, he was down there,” Hanson said.
“Identify him?” Leonard said.
“It’s Illium Moon. Looks like a suicide. Providing you accept the old
bookmobile in the pond method.”
“That’s unusual, all right,” I said.
“I’ve seen weirder,” Hanson said. “I seen a guy that had frayed a lamp cord,
plugged the good end into a socket, put the frayed end in a cup of water,
along with his dick. Barbecued that fucker.”
“His dick?” Leonard said.
“The rest of him too,” Hanson said.
“About Illium,” I said. “Find the goods on the couch?”
“Yep.”
“And?”
“I think it’s like you guys think,” Hanson said. “A setup. It’s too goddamned
cute.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Some of those kids’ clothes were new. Could be of
recent victims, but we don’t think so.”
Hanson said, “Whoever did Moon in wanted to make him look like he killed some
kids and had some souvenirs from the killings, but he didn’t want to give up
his own souvenirs, ’cause I’m sure he’s got ’em. A killer like this has always
got ’em. A few magazines he’s willing to lose, but the actual clothes his
victims wore, that’s much too special for a dick like this.”
“Couldn’t part with the stuff,” Charlie said, “so he went and bought some at
Kmart. I checked myself. Kmart is where I like to shop.”
“They got some deals all right,” I said.
“Yeah, and they take shit back easy, it don’t fit right,” Charlie said.
“I know a man likes Wal-Mart for that same reason,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” Charlie said, “Wal-Mart’s all right.”
“You guys through shopping?” Hanson said.
“He’s always business,” Charlie said. “He don’t get any recreation.”
Hanson ignored him. He got out his sloppy-ended cigar and put it in his mouth
and did the side-to-side routine with it. He said, “Some of the jeans are
brands and styles not made until this year. There might be one authentic piece
in there, something belonged to one of the dead boys, but that’s it. And I’d
stake my career on it.”
“Actually, way this is going,” Charlie said, “you’re staking my career on it
too.”
“Wouldn’t that be a loss?” Hanson said. He turned to us. “Newspapers are
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gonna be bad to Moon, I think. I can’t do anything about that. We can hold off
what we found a little while, but not long. Best thing we can do is prove the
truth here, show he’s been set up. You boys look at the files?”
“Sure.” I said.
“Anything?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Don’t be coy,” he said, “we had a deal.”
“Still do,” Leonard said. “The deal is we let you in on what we know when we
want you to know it.”
Hanson took the cigar out of his mouth and put it in his coat pocket and took
a deep breath like his chest hurt. I hurt with him. I wasn’t sure we were
right in holding anything back. I was still going by Leonard’s rules, but I
wasn’t certain how much longer I could do that. I was getting scared.
“Listen,” Hanson said. “I’m playing with you guys ’cause I think you got
something and I want it and I don’t want to climb mountains to get it. But you
start thinking we’re too cozy, start thinking this is all play, I’ll wring
your fuckin’ necks for you. I’ll throw you so far under the goddamn jail
you’ll be wearing a coolie hat.”
“Damn,” Leonard said, “I think my pulse just jumped a little.”
Hanson seemed to swell. “Fuck with me, you smart-ass motherfucker, just fuck
with me, see where it gets you.”
“I wouldn’t fuck you with Hap’s dick,” Leonard said. “Hell, I wouldn’t fuck
you with Charlie’s dick.”
Hanson moved toward Leonard, and Charlie caught him, and I put an arm across
Leonard’s chest. I said, “Boys, let’s ease off, now.”
Hanson took a deep breath. He tried to smile but made a face like a man that
had just found a dog turd in his mouth. “All right,” he said. “All right, I’m
OK. I’ll play your way. But only for a little while. A very goddamn little
while.”
29.
A night of heat lightning. A giant bed.
Leonard had found that the couch was more to his liking for some reason, so
the bed had stayed mine. That had been all right when Florida was around, but
now I felt I ought to try and get him to trade. I decided that would be an
important topic of conversation tomorrow. Why I should have the fold-out couch
and he should have the bed. It was the time of night when stuff like that
seemed significant.
I lay there and counted sheep, tried to remember the name of every dog I had
ever owned, attempted to let my mind go blank, all the stuff you do when
you’re restless, but I still couldn’t sleep. I thought about Florida. The way
she smiled and talked, the nights we had spent together. That special first
night we had made love, that night out at the overlook when I thought our
relationship was cementing.
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I thought about Hanson. I wanted to be mad at him, but he hadn’t done
anything but respond to what was there to respond to. Hell, I liked the big
bastard. Really. He was a swell guy. I just hoped his dick would fall off.
I got up and sat by the window awhile and watched the heat lightning leap
around. When that bored me, I watched the drug sellers and their clients. The
clients came and went as brisk as patrons at a drive-through hamburger joint.
I attempted to listen in on conversations, but all I could hear was talking
that sounded like bees buzzing, that and occasional bursts of laughter and the
sound of their music, which from where I sat was mostly the throb of the bass
line; I felt it more than I heard it.
When I tired of that, I put on my sweatpants and did a few Hapkido moves,
shadowboxed a bit, then turned on the end-table light, stretched out on the
bed, and tried to get back into readingThe Hereafter Gang.
I was managing to do that when along about midnight I heard a noise, like
whimpering. Then there was a slight banging under the house, followed by
silence.
I listened a moment, and it didn’t repeat itself. I figured a dog had gotten
up under there, bumped its head, and moved on, but I was too nervous to let it
be. Lately, with the stuff we’d found and the assholes next door, a bird
chirped, Leonard cut a fart, I was ready to leap.
I turned off the reading light, got out of bed, put on my shoes, got my .38,
and went out into the living room.
Leonard was up and putting on his shoes. I wasn’t the only one hearing
things. There was enough moonlight in the room I could see his face. He nodded
at me. He went over to the closet and opened it quietly and got the
twelve-gauge pump.
“Front or back?” he said.
“Front.”
“Get the door, count twenty-five slowly. That’ll time us close.”
I went to the door and quietly as possible freed the locks. I was up to
fifteen on my counting when I heard Leonard open the back door and slip out.
The shitass was counting too fast. I opened the front door and darted onto the
front porch, bending low.
The outside was lit with starlight and the clean silver rays of the moon, and
off in the east was the heat lightning. I could see quite well, but there
wasn’t anything to see.
I held my position and listened, felt a little silly. All I could hear were
the assholes next door. Their voices. Their music. I looked over there. The
porch light had been turned off, but I could see a couple of people on the
porch. I could hear them talking. They weren’t looking in my direction. I
eased down the porch steps and stopped to listen again. And heard something
this time.
The whimpering. It reminded me a bit of a dog I’d had when I was a kid. It
had been fed glass in raw hamburger meat by our next-door neighbor who didn’t
like it digging in his flowerbeds. The dog died. When my dad found out what
happened, he worked the neighbor over with his fists and tried to feed him
about three feet of a garden rake handle. He finished up by using the
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neighbor’s head to plow the man’s flowers up. My dad liked animals. For
petunias, he didn’t give a damn.
I eased toward the sound, which was consistent now and had turned to a
moaning. I went around the side of the house and saw Leonard down on his hands
and knees. He had put the shotgun on the ground and was crawling through a gap
in the skirting around the house.
By the time I got over there, Leonard was backing out and pulling something
out with him. It was a kid. He had the boy by the pants, and when he had him
tugged out from under there, I recognized him in the moonlight. It was the boy
who had gotten the shot of horse on Uncle Chester’s front porch, the boy who’d
ended up with a beeper.
The boy was shaking and his eyes were rolled up in his head and he was making
the sound that had reminded me of the dog. He was in a bad way and didn’t seem
to know where he was. He’d crawled under the house like a wounded animal,
seeking the dark, the cool pressure of the ground. I thought it odd that the
gap in the siding, the place he’d chosen to hide and try and ride out his
pain, was beneath the flooring Leonard and I had built. He had been lying not
far from where Leonard had discovered the trunk with the pathetic little bones
inside. I realized now in my dream, when I had visualized the child in the
trunk, the bones dressed in flesh, it had been the face of this boy I had
seen.
“He don’t seem to be injured,” Leonard said. “I don’t see any blood.”
“Overdose,” I said. “He’s riding the merry-go-round, hard.”
“Goddamn them,” Leonard said. “He’s just a baby.”
I gave the revolver to Leonard and picked up the boy. “I’m calling an
ambulance.”
I started across the street to MeMaw’s. I heard an asshole yell from the
crack house, “Hey, whatcha got there?”
The sound of that guy’s voice was like sandpaper on my brain. Later, I would
think back and know that voice had been the snapping point, the catalyst for
what was to follow. I heard that voice and was reminded of what was going on
next door, and thought: here Leonard and I were trying to stop some whacko
from torturing and killing kids, and in quite a different way, next door to
us, operating against the law, but not restrained or bothered by it, a whole
houseful of ball sweats were doing a similar thing, and we weren’t stopping
them, weren’t making any effort to. Kids were being tortured to death by
addiction, and the drug dealers were taking in big money and making friends
with the bail bondsmen, and were practically being treated like businessmen.
I went up on the porch and kicked the bottom of the door, yelled, “MeMaw.
Hiram. Emergency. It’s me, Hap.”
A few minutes later the door opened. It was Hiram. He stood looking at us
through the screen. He was dressed in his bathrobe and the expression on his
face was odd. You’d have thought I was bringing him a take-out order.
“Wha . . . ?” he said.
“Wake up, man. Got an emergency here.”
I could feel the boy shivering in my arms. I glanced down at him. Saliva was
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running out of the corner of his mouth and his body was trying to bend into a
fetal position.
“Yeah . . . yeah,” Hiram said, and opened the screen.
I slid inside, said, “I need to call an ambulance. We found him by the house.
Drug overdose, I think.”
“I’ll take him,” Hiram said. “No need to wake Mama. She’s sick.”
I handed the boy to Hiram, and he held him and looked at him, then took him
around the table and into the back room. I used the phone to call the
ambulance. I’d no sooner done that when I heard a shotgun blast.
I ran outside, keeping low. I saw Leonard standing in the yard of the crack
dealers. He had a shotgun. He fired another shot into the side of the house.
He yelled: “Out, ever’body out!”
“Leonard,” I yelled, and I started running across the street. I wasn’t fast
enough. He’d reached the porch over there, and there was one guy still
standing on it, standing between Leonard and the front door. Not because he
was brave, because he was petrified.
Leonard reached out and shoved him aside. The guy went over the edge of the
porch and rolled on the grass and got up and started running.
Leonard tried to open the front door, but someone had locked it. I got up on
the front porch about the time Leonard screamed, “Stand back, motherfuckers,”
and shot a hole through the door big enough to poke your head through.
I grabbed Leonard by the shoulder, “Hold up, man.”
Leonard looked back at me, and I saw in his eyes what I had felt moments ago.
Anger. Frustration.
“You can’t kill them, Leonard.”
“I can kill the house.”
I took my hand off his shoulder and stood back, and he kicked the door where
the blast had torn a hole, and the hole got wider, and he kicked again, and an
entire panel of the door collapsed, and swift as a summer cloud blowing across
the face of the sun, Leonard hit the door and it went to pieces and he was
inside.
And I was in after him.
The house was poorly lit, and when we came through the door, Mohawk and the
one I called Parade Float came out of the dark. They leaped and grabbed
Leonard, one on either side, Mohawk trapping the shotgun against Leonard’s
body.
Mohawk yelled, “Now, baby.”
Over Leonard’s shoulder I saw a stringy white woman with greasy hair, dressed
in nothing but a pair of shorts, stick a little automatic in Leonard’s face
and pull the trigger.
* * *
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Nothing happened. The gun had jammed. A rush of adrenaline shot through me
like a gusher of crude oil blasting to the surface.
I stepped in and hit Mohawk in the side of the head with a right and he
loosened up on Leonard just as Leonard kicked the woman in front of him in the
stomach and sent her tumbling down the hallway.
I reached out and clawed my fingers across Mohawk’s face, raking him in the
eyes, and then I turned sideways and kicked him in the side of the knee. The
kick was off, and the knee didn’t break, but he yelped and let go of Leonard
and fell backward through an open doorway.
Leonard was using the shotgun stock to do some dental work on Parade Float
when I went by him and grabbed the woman. She was obviously fucked up on
something and feeling no pain, and she’d gotten up on her knees and grabbed
the gun again. She pointed it at my groin, and I reached down and scooped it
aside with my palm and jumped in close and grabbed her head with both my hands
and gave her a knee in the face, hard as I could. I figured I’d be hearing
from the Southern Club for Manhood after that, but I didn’t give a shit, you
try and hurt me, I’m going hurt you back. She went backward with her nose flat
and blood flying and the gun went off and plaster puffed out of the wall. I
kneed her again, and the automatic went sailing away from her, down the hall,
and now there were guys coming out of nowhere, all over, a half-dozen of them,
and one of them came up behind me and grabbed me in a full nelson. I dropped
to a wide stance and punched forward with both hands, and that loosened the
guy’s grip. I wheeled and hit him in the side of the head with my elbow, and
followed on around with my body and scooped my arm around behind his head and
pulled him down and kneed him in the groin and kicked the inside of one of his
knees and then the other, and the second one broke with a sound like a
drumstick snapping.
I took a punch in the side of the head and one in the kidney and I yelled and
turned and hit a guy with a forearm and saw another guy fly by me on the end
of Leonard’s foot, and then I saw the stock of Leonard’s shotgun catch another
one in the side of the head, and after that I saw less of Leonard because I
was busy.
I threw some punches and kicks, but mostly punches and knees and elbows,
because the working conditions were tight. Guys started running past me and
Leonard, darting for the door. Back of the house I heard a woman scream, and
some guys yell, and the back door slammed, and I knew a fistful of folks who’d
been on the buy were out of there and making tracks.
I checked the woman. She was still out.
I looked behind me. Parade Float was on his ass, unconscious, leaning against
the wall, dribbling blood-soaked teeth down his chest. He was still wearing
his shower cap. Those things were really worth the money.
Another guy, the one whose knee I’d broke, was on the floor screaming so loud
I thought my brain would turn to mush. Leonard walked over and kicked the guy
in the face, hard, and I grabbed him to keep him from doing it again.
Leonard turned away from me and went into the room where Mohawk had gone, and
I ran over there and entered just behind him. And there was Mohawk, on the
bed, on his knees, holding a revolver, pointing it at Leonard. The gun
vibrated like a guitar string. Mohawk said, “Don’t! Don’t now. I’ll shoot your
goddamn dick off. Get away from me, you crazy nigger.”
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And Leonard, truly crazy, crazed as if he had a hot soldering iron rammed up
his ass, walked right up to him. Mohawk didn’t fire because he was too scared
to fire, afraid the bullets would bounce off Leonard’s chest.
Leonard tossed the shotgun on the bed, reached out and grabbed the barrel of
Mohawk’s gun and twisted it away from him and grabbed him by the throat with
the other hand. He tossed the gun aside and whipped Mohawk around and put his
forearm under Mohawk’s chin and applied a judo choke. One of those that
doesn’t cut the wind, just cuts the blood off to the brain, and because of
that, I knew Leonard had gotten himself together.
Mohawk thrashed a little, then got still.
I put a hand on Leonard’s shoulder. “Let him go, man.”
Leonard let him go, and Mohawk fell off the bed and onto the floor. He was
out. With that choke, it only takes a few seconds.
Leonard got Mohawk by the feet and dragged him out of the bedroom, and I
watched from the hallway as Leonard pulled him onto the front porch, and down
the steps, Mohawk’s head thumping the steps like bongos. Leonard laid Mohawk
out in the yard and came back in the house. He reached down and got Parade
Float by the shirtfront and boosted him to his feet and put the big bastard
over his shoulder and turned to me.
“Drag ’em out,” he said.
I went over and picked the woman up. She was very light. A temporary feeling
of guilt went over me, hitting her like that, but then I thought of the gun
pointing at my balls and her firing it, and I wanted to hit her again. I took
her out in the yard and laid her between Mohawk and Parade Float. I went back
inside and got hold of the guy with the broken knee and pulled him onto the
porch and shoved him off. He screamed all the way and really screamed when he
hit the ground.
In the distance, we could hear the ambulance sirens.
“Inside,” Leonard said.
We went inside and into the bedroom where Mohawk had been. Leonard pulled the
mattress off the bed and started dragging it through the doorway. He piled it
in the hallway, and I followed after him as if I were a strand of toilet paper
stuck to his shoe.
We went into the kitchen, and Leonard rumbled around and found a box of
kitchen matches. He tried to open the box but was so wired he dropped them on
the floor. I picked up the box and opened it and got a match out and struck it
on the side of the box and handed it to him.
He grinned at me. The devil was behind that grin. He took the match and
carefully lit a curtain over the kitchen window. The curtain began to blaze. I
got a match out, went over to a sack of overflowing garbage, struck the match
on the counter and looked at the flame. I saw the overdosed child in it, saw
the dead bodies beneath the house, the bones in the trunk, the shadowy shape
of Illium.
I dropped the match on top of a grease-splattered Hamburger Helper box. A
moment later the sack was flaming. I kicked the fiery sack under the kitchen
table and the flames licked up and caught the plastic table cloth. The table
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itself was littered with garbage. It caught fire pretty quick.
We moved down the hallway, and Leonard took out his pocketknife and cut the
mattress open. I lit the stuffing inside, and the mattress blazed mightily.
We did the same sort of thing in the bedroom with the curtains and the
sheets. Leonard rescued his shotgun, and we went over to the bathroom and
found some bottles of alcohol in the medicine cabinet. We sloshed that around
the place and lit it. Flames raced up the walls.
By the time we walked out the front door our matches were used up and the
house was seriously on fire. There were ambulance attendants in the yard,
looking at Mohawk and the others. There was an ambulance at the curb.
“Not those assholes,” Leonard said, pointing across the street. “There’s a
boy over there.”
One of the attendants looked at us, let his eyes rest on the shotgun cradled
in Leonard’s arms. “Easy, fellow. We’re on it.”
I looked at MeMaw’s house. I was sure she was up now, sick or not. Lights
were on all over. There was an ambulance out front. Attendants were sliding a
stretcher into the back of it. Hiram was on the front porch. He looked over at
me and Leonard. The red-and-blue lights from the ambulance strobed across him,
blended with the yellow-white porch light. He didn’t lift his hand toward us.
I turned back to the crack house. I could see flames behind the windows, like
the light inside a jack-o’-lantern. One of the windows exploded suddenly, and
a thick coil of black smoke rolled out into the night. It carried a stench
with it. Burning plastic perhaps. Or just all the badness in that house on
fire.
“Those old wood-frame houses certainly do catch quick,” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Lumber’s mellow when it gets that old.”
Me and Leonard walked back to Uncle Chester’s house. Leonard had tossed my
.38 onto the porch, and he showed me where it was, and I got it.
We went inside and waited for the inevitable.
30.
Holding cells are very small and short on comfort. And this one smelled like
a dog kennel. Me and Leonard were sitting on the floor with about ten other
guys, and the floor was cold and hard and not a single throw pillow was in
sight. A drunk kept trying to put his head in my lap and wanted to call me
Cheryl.
There was one toilet in the place, but you sat down on it to take a dump,
everyone was going to be looking at you. I can take about anything, but I like
private toilet space. In my book, defecation is not a spectator sport. It
wasn’t that I needed to go, but I was worried about the situation if the
necessity arose. Of course, the bars and the back wall of the cell were
painted a very comfortable blue, and that’s supposed to be a relaxing color if
you’re trying to make with a bowel movement. If memory serves me, however,
green is better. Perhaps I could suggest that to the jailer. Get an audience
with the mayor.
Another bad thing about a holding cell is you don’t exactly meet a great
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crowd of people. A lot of them are criminals.
The people we’d had our row with weren’t around. I figured Parade Float was
visiting an oral surgeon, and the rest were at the hospital. But we had some
real cuties nonetheless. One of them, a greasy white guy with the physique of
an industrial meat freezer and a swastika tattooed on his forehead in red ink,
got his dick out and pissed between the bars on a jailer’s leg. A cop came
over and yelled at him, and the guy pissed on the cop. The cop hit the bars
with his nightstick and cussed, and the big guy laughed and turned around and
shook the dew off his dick.
“Fucking assholes,” the big guy said, then he quit grinning and looked all of
us in the holding cell over. “You’re assholes too,” he said.
None of us assholes argued with him. Me and Leonard, we were tired and sore
assholes. The big guy, without putting his dick up, wandered over to the far
edge of the cell and intimidated a sad-looking little Mexican guy by giving
him the hairy eyeball. Also, a guy staring at you with his dick out will make
a person nervous.
Hanson came up to the bars and stood looking inside. He was dressed in a
black T-shirt and jeans and what looked like house slippers. His stomach
bulged inside the T-shirt, but it looked hard, like a washpot. The wet end of
a chewed cigar stuck out of the T-shirt pocket. I gave him a little wave. He
smiled insincerely and spread his arms wide. “My boys! How are you?”
“We’re a little tired, Lieutenant,” Leonard said.
“Arson and assault, trespassing,” Hanson said. “These things wear on you.
Jailer. Open up.”
The jailer opened up. Hanson stood in the open doorway and said, “My boys,
come to me.”
We got up and started out. The big guy with his dick out came over and tried
to follow after us. “Not you,” Hanson said, and after we passed Hanson pushed
the guy back inside.
“Piss on you,” the big guy said and thrust his hips forward like he was going
to piss on Hanson. Hanson reached very quickly and grabbed the guy’s crank and
yanked it as if he were popping a whip. The guy made a noise like a sudden
hole in a helium balloon and went down to his knees.
Hanson said, “Put that thing away, or I’ll have it mounted on a board.”
Hanson came out of the cell, the jailer closed the door, and Hanson gave us a
soft shove down the corridor.
* * *
We came to a door and Hanson reached between us and opened it. “Gentlemen,”
he said.
We went inside. It was an office full of smoke. Charlie was sitting behind
the only desk in the room with his feet propped on it. He had thin soles on
his shoes. He had a copy of a trash rag and was reading it. He had his suit
coat slung over the back of the chair, and he was wearing a green pajama shirt
stuck in his slacks, and he had his porkpie hat tilted back on his head.
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Mohawk was sitting in a fold-out metal chair on the left side of the room.
Just sitting there smoking a cigarette. There was an ashtray on the floor in
front of him and it was filled with cigarettes. There were stomped out
cigarettes all around the ashtray.
Charlie wasn’t paying Mohawk the least bit of attention. He didn’t look at us
when we entered the room. He was deep into his rag.
On the right hand side of the room, wreathed in Charlie’s smoke, was Florida.
She was leaning against the wall next to a fold-out chair. She was dressed in
jeans and a tight white T-shirt; she was a knockout. Just what I needed to see
at a time like this. Then again, I knew she’d be here. She was mine and
Leonard’s lawyer, and when I got my one call, I’d called her.
“Hap,” she said.
“Florida,” I said. “Thanks.”
Leonard nodded at her.
Hanson said, “Charlie, watch ’em. I got to wash my hands. I been pullin’ a
guy’s dick.”
Charlie didn’t look up from his rag. He just lifted a hand over it. Hanson
went out and shut the door.
I glanced at Mohawk and Mohawk glanced at me. He’d looked better. His mohawk
was leaning a bit to the left, and there wasn’t one ounce of cockiness about
him. There was a knot on the side of his head where I’d hit him. He looked
away from me and took in Leonard.
Leonard smiled at him. It was one of those smiles Leonard can give that you’d
really prefer not to see. Mohawk’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and fell back down.
He dropped his eyes to the floor. The cigarette between his fingers was almost
burned down to his skin. He sucked it once and dropped it. It nearly hit the
ashtray. He said, “Where the hell’s my motherfuckin’ lawyer? They got their
lawyer here, I want mine.”
“Got to call him first,” Charlie said, and turned a page on his rag.
“You ain’t let me call shit, man,” Mohawk said. “That ain’t legal.”
“Hey,” Charlie said, “we’re busy, we’ll get to it.”
“You look busy,” said Mohawk.
“The work of the mind is subtle,” Charlie said.
During this exchange, Charlie hadn’t once looked away from his paper. He kept
reading. After a few moments, without taking his face out of the paper, he
said, “You know, there’s some strange things in the world. They found a
picture of Elvis in an Egyptian tomb.” He put the paper down and looked at me.
“You know that, Hap?”
“No shit?” I said.
“No shit. Painted right there on the fucking wall. Had his hair slicked back
and stuff. Had on a white jump suit and aviator glasses. It’s right here in
the article. They got a picture.”
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“Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “They hunt around the tomb some more, they expect to
find a mummy with the facial structure of Elvis.”
“You’re certainly on top of things,” I said.
“You’d be surprised the stuff I know,” Charlie said. “I keep up with current
events. I’m real current. Most current is I had to get out of bed ’cause I
heard about a fire tonight, and I heard it was you two assholes set it.”
“We looked out our window and saw a fire,” Leonard said. “We went over to
help pull the victims to safety. We’re goddamn heroes.”
“That motherfucker’s lying!” Mohawk said.
“Keep your seat, Melton,” Charlie said.
“Don’t say anything else,” Florida said to Leonard. “You and Hap be quiet.
You’ll do better being quiet.”
“Ah hell,” Charlie said, “Hap and Leonard, they like to talk.”
“That’s true,” Leonard said. “We can’t shut up.”
Hanson opened the door and came in. He went over to the desk. “You mind I
have my chair?” he said to Charlie.
“Naw,” Charlie said, “it’s all right.”
Charlie got up and went over to Mohawk. He said, “Get up, Melton.”
Mohawk looked at Charlie. Charlie grinned. Mohawk got up and leaned against
the wall. Charlie sat down and used his foot to move the ashtray and the
ill-aimed cigarette butts aside. He scooted the chair forward and put his feet
on the edge of the desk and rocked back so the chair was against the wall. He
looked pretty precarious.
Hanson sat behind his desk and studied me and Leonard. “First time I seen you
guys, I liked you. I don’t like you so much now.”
“That hurts,” Leonard said. “Shit, man, we like you.”
“I been eating Rolaids like they’re candy,” Hanson said. “I almost lit my
cigar again. And you guys know why? I’m tired of the bullshit. Arson, that’s a
serious crime.”
“So’s selling drugs,” I said. “That boy under our house might even think
using them’s a bad idea.”
“He don’t think nothing,” Hanson said. “He died before he got to the
hospital.”
Silence reigned for a moment. Leonard said, “I think the whole goddamn police
force has got some gall, that’s what I think. These fuckers,” he jabbed a
finger at Melton, “they been in that house for ages, selling drugs. They fed
that boy dope. That boy is dead, man, and I’m not supposed to have a right to
get pissed? I know they’re selling drugs. Everyone here knows it, but now you
got us on arson, and you’re saying we’ll do time?”
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“Could be,” Hanson said. “I ain’t got shit to do with the way the law works,
just with doing what it says.”
“Some law that lets people like this creep do what they’re doing,” I said.
“What happened to justice?”
“We get enough evidence, we pick ’em up,” Hanson said.
“And let them go,” Charlie said.
Hanson looked at Charlie. “You quittin’ the force? You with them?”
“I’m a cop ’cause I want to lock bad guys up,” Charlie said.
“I don’t want to pick ’em up so they can come down here to use the phone and
toilet. And I certainly don’t want to arrest no citizens on a
misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding?” Hanson said.
Charlie took his feet off the desk and let the chair rock forward. “Couple of
citizens see a fire, go in and rescue some people, I don’t see that’s a
crime.”
“They kneed a woman in the face!” Mohawk said. “They knocked out my main
man’s teeth.”
“That woman’s a crack head,” Charlie said, “and she got that way ’cause of
you. She’s a hooker. She stabbed a girl friend near to death three years ago.
She’s got a record longer than a basketball player’s leg. And your main man,
hell, he’s fixed up good now. All them teeth missing. You ought to be
grateful. He can suck your dick like a vacuum cleaner.”
“Just the thought of that gets me excited,” Leonard said.
“I’d also like to mention the woman got kneed in the face stuck a gun in my
balls,” I said.
“Let’s cool our language,” Hanson said. “We got a lady present.”
“Why all of a sudden?” Charlie said. “And besides, she ain’t a lady now.
She’s a lawyer.”
Florida smiled. She said, “Marvin, my clients just saw a fire and went to
help.”
“Oh, God,” Hanson said, “not you too.”
“I’m sure the owner of the dwelling, Mr. Otis—”
“Some fat cat honkie, I reckon,” Leonard said.
“One of the fattest,” Florida said. “Mr. Otis, who I know is an upstanding
citizen, and a friend of the police chief, would be upset to discover the
house he’s renting out is being used to sell drugs.”
“Naw,” Charlie said. “Old fart gets a slice of the action.”
“We don’t know that,” Hanson said.
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“We can’t prove it,” Charlie said. “Ain’t the same thing.”
“I’m sure he would be upset,” Florida persisted. “But I know he’d be happy to
hear of the bravery of men like Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, who selflessly
went to the rescue of the inhabitants.”
“We see our duty,” Leonard said, “we do it. We can’t help it. It’s the way we
were raised.”
“Yeah,” Hanson said, “and in the process of doing your duty y’all knocked a
man’s teeth out, broke another’s knee, and busted up a woman’s nose.”
“Hey,” Leonard said. “My knuckles hurt. They’re all scraped up. Show him your
head, Hap.” I turned the side of my head toward Hanson. Leonard pointed to it.
“See there, he’s got a bruise.”
“Christ,” Hanson said.
“Sometimes, in the heat of the moment,” Florida said, “even when you’re
trying to do a good deed, you can make mistakes. They were rough, but they
saved lives.”
“They set the fire!” Mohawk said.
“I been in that place,” Charlie said. “Knocked the door down and come to
visit a number of times. Joint’s a shit hole, a fire hazard. Fire could have
started any kind of way.”
“You have a shotgun with you to shoot the fire out,” Hanson said to Leonard.
“EMTs said you were carrying a shotgun.”
“I was cleaning it. We heard the boy under the house, didn’t know what it
was, and we’d seen the fire out the window, so I rushed out with it in my
hand. I was so excited I forgot I had it.”
“Shut up!” Hanson said. “Every one of you, shut up. Charlie, take Melton here
to the restroom.”
“I don’t need to go,” Mohawk said.
Charlie stood up and took Mohawk by the elbow. “Sure you do. Come on, I’ll
show you how to fold the toilet paper.”
Charlie and Mohawk started past us. I said, “Thanks, Charlie.”
“Us Kmart shoppers got to stick together,” he said, and he and Mohawk went
away.
Hanson said, “All right, let’s cut the bullshit. Here’s the deal. I don’t
give a damn about that house or Melton and his asshole buddies. I want them
nailed bad as you do. I don’t want any more drugged-out dead kids. But I’ve
had all the cat-and-mouse I’m gonna do on this child murder thing. I don’t
want any more dead kids that way either. You jerks are gonna come clean, or
I’m gonna use this arson thing to nail you, and don’t think I won’t.”
“And don’t think I won’t give your case a hard time in court,” Florida said.
“Melton wouldn’t exactly make a sympathetic witness. Neither would the rest of
the house’s occupants.”
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“You’d do that to me?” Hanson said.
“Business,” Florida said, and smiled at Hanson.
Hanson smiled back. “Yeah, guess you would. All right, here’s how it’s coming
down. You two saw a fire, went to help, couple of occupants panicked, didn’t
know you were trying to rescue ’em, so they got rough, and you got rough, but
you saved them. OK?”
Leonard and I agreed.
“I’ll call Melton back,” Hanson said, “explain to him he wants to fight it,
he can fight it, but it’s just gonna be shit for him. He’ll talk tough a
couple of minutes and let it slide. He don’t want any court trouble, I’ll
promise that.”
“He hasn’t seen court trouble till I get on his ass,” Florida said.
I looked at Florida and smiled. She smiled back. For a moment it seemed like
we were together again.
“In return for me being the generous fella I am,” Hanson said, “for not
dragging your asses through court and sending you upriver, you’re gonna be
sweet as sugar to me. You’re gonna tell me some things you know that I don’t
know. Got me?”
I glanced at Leonard. He nodded. He said, “I guess we’ve played detective
enough.”
He told Hanson about the Hampstead place and what we found. But I noticed he
conspicuously left out the sweet Reverend Fitzgerald.
31.
Hanson let us go, charge free. Florida took me and Leonard home. When she
pulled into the driveway and we got out, she got out too. The smell of burnt
lumber from next door was strong in the air. Florida said, “Hap, can we talk a
moment?”
“Sure,” I said.
Florida looked at Leonard.
“I’m worn out,” Leonard said. “I’m just going to take a cheerful look of
what’s left of next door, then go to sleep.”
We walked around to the bottle tree and stood there looking at the smoky,
blackened shell of the house.
“Mucho mojo,” Florida said.
“What?” I said.
“Much bad magic,” she said. “Next door was mucho mojo. Something my
grandmother used to say.Mojo is African for magic.”
“I thought it was sex,” I said.
“That’s because you listen to blues records,” she said. “It is sex, or even
the sex organs. But that’s bastardized. Meaning sex is like magic.Mojo means
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magic. My grandmother knew some Spanish, and when things were bad, she’d say
‘mucho mojo.’ Spanishmucho for much, Africanmojo for magic. But what she meant
when she said it was much bad magic. To her, mojo was always bad.”
“Well, they’re a little less bad next door,” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said. “And we can feel good looking out our windows, but they’ll
just move to some other street. They’re not really gone, they’re merely
inconvenienced.”
“I’d rather inconvenience them than just let them go,” Leonard said. “Scum
like that get inconvenienced often enough, they might think the career they
got isn’t worth it. It’s the good folks of the world that are supposed to be
in charge, not the assholes. Though, in my darker moments, I sometimes fear
the assholes outnumber us. By the way, Florida, who’s this Otis guy?”
“White guy who owned the house, and a lot of houses here on the East Side,”
Florida said. “I’ve heard he openly refers to these as his nigger rent houses.
And it’s pretty well known he gets a cut of the drug pie over here.”
“And he’s a friend of the police chief’s,” Leonard said.
“Yes,” Florida said. “And he’ll just build the house back. Cheaply, of
course.”
“Well, that’s for another discussion,” Leonard said. “Good night, Florida.
Hap, don’t you stay up late, now. I don’t want you fussin’ when I get you out
of bed tomorrow.”
Leonard went in the house and Florida and I sat on the porch in the glider. I
remembered that the glider was where our romance had begun.
I said, “This is sort of the Dear-John talk, right?”
“I’ve wanted to talk to you, I just haven’t had the guts, because I really
don’t know what to say.”
“I guess ‘Bye-bye, Hap, and don’t forget your hat’ would be OK.”
“It’s not like that.”
“How is it?”
“I’m going over to Marve’s tonight.”
“I’d rather you just said, ‘Bye-bye, don’t forget your hat.’”
“He’s a good man, Hap.”
“That’s what pisses me off. It’s hard for me to feel self-righteous. I like
the big bastard. But I still don’t like hearing it. Not that I didn’t already
know.”
“I wanted you to hear it from me. I just didn’t have the courage to do it
right away. I should have said something soon as I knew. Hap, it wasn’t like
you and me were a hundred percent anyway. I never said our relationship was
forever.”
“Hurts just the same.”
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“You’ll get over it.”
“Yeah, but I’d rather it have worked out.”
“Me too. Really. I do care for you. I maybe even love you a little.”
“Please.”
“It just happened, Hap. I don’t know what to tell you. It happened, and it
happened fast. It was good between you and me, and you taught me some things
about myself, but—”
“Hanson’s black.”
“I suppose, if I’m honest with myself, I’ll admit that makes it easier.”
“You never took me to that movie, Florida. You know, I never even been to
your place. I bet Hanson has. Hasn’t he?”
“Yes. But I knew the night I saw him over here he was the one. I don’t know
why. I’d seen him before, but that night was the first time I was really close
enough to feel the heat.”
“Maybe it was just a hot night.”
She smiled. “No. It wasn’t just a sexual thing. There was that, but it’s not
that he’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“He’s not the prettiest thing anyone’s ever seen.”
“But I saw him, and somehow I knew. And the other night, when he took me
home, we didn’t go to bed or anything like that. I wanted you to know that. We
didn’t just jump in the sack. We talked, and talked, and talked. There was a
connection between us that goes deeper than the one you and I’ve got. It’s
that simple. Maybe being black does give us a kind of history, but what I feel
for Marve isn’t merely because he’s black.”
“Of course, you two don’t just talk now.”
“First time we made love was tonight. Charlie called for him at my place when
they got the news about the fire and about you and Leonard. After Marve left,
you called and told me where you were. But of course, I already knew. I was
about to be on my way. I figured you and Leonard could use a lawyer.”
“Did Charlie calling interrupt anything?”
“That’s juvenile, Hap.”
“Sorry.”
“We were lying in bed talking. Talking about you.”
“Comparing dick sizes?”
She got up briskly and started to leave. I caught her wrist and she jerked it
away from me. “Let go of me, damnit!”
“Florida,” I said. “I’m sorry. Really. But this isn’t easy for me.”
“It’s not easy for me, Hap. I don’t want to hurt you.”
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“But you want us to be friends, right? Isn’t that the thrust of this talk?”
“I know you’re hurt, but I didn’t plan this. It happened, damnit. It just
happened.”
I turned my head and looked toward the pile of blackened rubble that had been
the crack house. Smoke was drifting up into the starlight. I turned back and
looked at Florida.
“There really isn’t anything I can say to that,” I said.
She slowly and carefully sat down beside me. She sat close. I could smell her
perfume. It was the same perfume I often smelled on my pillows. She took my
hand.
I said, “You really sounded like someone who was more than an ambulance
chaser tonight.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Hanson knew you got our case in court, personal feelings or not, you’d have
given him hell.”
“And I’d have beat him too. Even if you did burn the house down. And on
purpose.”
“You’ll do all right,” I said. “Maybe you just needed a little rest. Sounds
to me, you got your ambition back.”
“Can we be friends?” she said. “I know it sounds cliché. But I really and
truly want to be friends.”
I spent a minute thinking about it. “Give me some time on it. Right now I
look at you, I don’t see you that way. I don’t know how I see you.”
She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re a good find for the right
person, Hap. I’m just not the right person.”
“That’s what they all say.”
She stood up and touched my shoulder. “I’ll see you, soon?”
“Soon as I can handle it,” I said.
She drove away. I watched her taillights till they were out of sight. The
wind picked up and turned cool and hooted in the bottle tree.
32.
When I awoke it was early morning and I was lying on the glider and my back
ached. Where I’d caught those punches hurt too. My wrist ached from the shock
of the blow I’d dealt Mohawk on the side of the head.
There was a blanket over me and a pillow under my head. Leonard, the one
constant in my life, had been out to check on me. I hadn’t even felt him move
my head or cover me. Bless him.
I sat up slowly, feeling the stiffness. The air was intense with the charred
aroma of next door. The sunlight was beautiful. It was still cool. I missed
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Florida.
Before we left the station last night, Leonard told Hanson about the
Hampstead place and what was under it. Today, late morning, Hanson and a
hand-picked crew would be out. He was also bringing in a friend from Houston,
a retired coroner.
In spite of his talk, Hanson wasn’t ready to turn what he knew over to the
police chief after all. He wanted to make sure everything we told him was as
we said, wanted to make sure we’d translated the evidence properly.
I think he knew too, if he told the police chief what he had discovered, told
how Illium was linked, the chief would take the case away from him for not
coming forward sooner. But if Leonard and I were right, if Hanson could get
all his ducks in a row and solve this case, no matter what the chief thought,
things were going to turn out OK. It’d be pretty hard for the chief to fire
Hanson for solving a multiple child-murder case, considering the publicity
that would surround it.
And I was pretty certain Hanson knew we were still holding out on him. That
we had an important part of the puzzle we weren’t showing.
So, Hanson was going to get a court order, quickly and quietly, not hide it
from the chief, but not announce it either, and he and his crew were coming
out.
His crew was going to be Charlie, the retired Houston coroner, me and
Leonard, and a couple other folks he thought he could trust. It wasn’t a
morning I looked forward to.
I stood up and stretched and checked out the remains of the crack house, felt
a rush of adrenaline from last night. I also felt a rush of shame.
Violence and anger against another human being always made me feel that way,
no matter what my justification. I lost it, I always feel somewhat diminished.
But I would have felt even more diminished to have done nothing. That little
boy, dying up under the house like a dog with a belly full of glass. . . .
It’s hard to figure why it has to be that way.
But had it been just that? Had I done what I did, followed Leonard because I
wanted vengeance for that child, all the children they infected with their
slick talk and drugs? Or had my willingness to lose it also been part of my
problem with Florida? Was I finding a way to self-righteously vent my
disappointment and rage? I didn’t like to think about that kind of snake
inside me, crawling around, waiting to strike.
Across the street I heard a screen door slam, and looked to see Hiram out on
MeMaw’s porch. He had a cup of coffee and was wearing blue jogging pants, a
blue T-shirt, and dirt-tinted white tennis shoes. He walked to the edge of the
porch and hacked up a big wad of phlegm and spat into the yard. He looked up
and saw me.
“Hap,” he called.
I walked out to the curb, talked across the street. “Thanks for last night,”
I said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
“What else could I do? How’s the boy?”
“Dead.”
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Hiram nodded. “I’m not surprised. He didn’t look none too good. He had that
look about him, like he wasn’t long for this world.”
The screen door opened and MeMaw started working her walker outside. Hiram
grabbed the screen and held it open. “You don’t need to come out here,” he
said.
“But I want to,” she said. After a full minute, she was in the center of the
porch, leaning on her walker. She said, “I’m glad you did it. I’d been
younger, I’d did it. Lenny up?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, you come on over,” she said. “I’ve got breakfast cooking.”
“Ma’am,” I said. “I don’t want to intrude.”
“Biscuits, eggs, and bacon,” she said. She turned her walker slightly, then
slightly again, until she was facing the screen. Hiram opened the screen for
her. She worked her way inside, called over her shoulder, “Don’t let it get
cold.”
Hiram smiled at me. He said, “I think you better come on to breakfast.”
* * *
MeMaw looked extremely frail that morning, but she was radiant just the same.
Happy about the crack house being turned to smoke, happier yet her baby boy
Hiram was home. The breakfast was great. The bacon was thick. She’d gotten the
meat from one of her sons who raised hogs, and we spread real artery-jamming
butter on the biscuits and dipped them in the sun-yellow yolks of farm-fresh
eggs acquired from a friend of hers who had his own chickens.
After breakfast, MeMaw entertained me and embarrassed Hiram with stories
about when he was a child, told some cute incidents, explained what a good
Christian child Hiram had always been, and when Hiram had had all of that talk
he could take, he said, “Hey, what’re your plans today, Hap?”
“Not much,” I said, not prepared to mention that I was going to exhume
bodies.
“You ought to work out with me.”
“After last night, I’m pretty bushed. What kind of workout?”
“Boxing.”
“I hate that boxing,” MeMaw said. “Two grown men hitting one another in the
head for fun. You’d think Hiram and Reverend Fitzgerald would be old enough to
know better.”
“Reverend Fitzgerald?” I said.
“Yeah. I come in once a year, we get together, do a little boxing, talk old
times. Play chess. I do it mostly to please MeMaw. She thinks I ought to know
the right hand of the Lord. Not that we didn’t get drilled with religion all
the time we were growing up.”
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“When I was able,” MeMaw said, “I saw that this family lived in the church.”
“You know Reverend Fitzgerald pretty good then?” I said.
“Didn’t you meet him the other day?” MeMaw asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “just briefly.”
I gave Hiram theReader’s Digest version of that, leaving out all the tense
stuff between him and Leonard. I was getting to be a pretty good liar.
“I’ve known Fitz for years,” Hiram said. “We used to go to his daddy’s
church. Me and him played together. His daddy taught the both of us how to
box. Fitz is a little older than me, but I’m a scrapper. ’Course, he still
beats hell out me. Or has in the past. I’m kind of hoping age will catch up
with him.”
“It hasn’t so far,” I said. “I saw him working a bag. He’s in shape. He can
still hit hard. He drags his back foot in the bucket a little when he moves,
but that could just be the way he works a bag.”
“You know something about boxing then?” Hiram said.
“A little.”
“Another man likes to get hit in the head,” MeMaw said. “I can’t figure it. .
. . By the way, how’s that little boy?”
It took me a moment to shift gears and know who she was talking about. Then
it came to me. I said, “He died, MeMaw. We found him too late. The drugs
snuffed him out.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry. A child like that, in that den of wolves, he
ain’t got no chance. What I’d like to know was where his mother was.”
I’d found out a little about the boy last night from Charlie and Hanson, and
I told MeMaw what I knew. “He was a street kid, MeMaw. Name of Ivan Lee.”
“I heard of the Lees,” MeMaw said, “but I can’t say I knew nothing about
them.”
“Ivan lived with an aunt,” I said, “but apparently there wasn’t much going on
there in a family way. He was on his own. Wasn’t even going to school, hung
out on the streets most of the time. He’d been picked up for little crimes
here and there. He fell through the cracks.”
“Over here,” MeMaw said, “lots fall through the cracks. There’s always
somethin’ pushin’ in on a person here. Bad people and bad things from all
sides. A baby has got to have a shield from the world. Got to learn how to
shield themselves. I’m lucky I raised all my chil’ren without none of them
gettin’ messed up.”
“Don’t fret, Mama,” Hiram said. “That little boy was a goner from the start.
Ain’t that right, Hap?”
“I don’t know anyone’s a goner, you get to them in time,” I said. “But
there’s a line you can step across that puts you on a path of no return. In
little Ivan’s case, I don’t know he stepped across so much as got shoved over
it.”
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“Maybe so,” Hiram said. “But if he runs with the dogs, he, well . . .
‘becomes like them that go down into the pit.’”
“I presume that’s biblical,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess it’s a way of saying birds of a feather stick together. Or if
you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. Whatever . . . whatcha say, Hap?
You gonna work out with me? We won’t be there long.”
I considered a moment. There really wasn’t any clear evidence, other than
circumstantial, that Fitzgerald had done the things Leonard and I thought he
had. There was still the possibility that Chester Pine and Illium Moon were
what we thought they were being framed to be. Another look at the Reverend
might be of interest.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m game.”
33.
We took Hiram’s van. It was a cluttered thing, and I had to move a small box
of folded Texas flags off the seat to sit down. I sat them on a box of
American flags in the back. Strewn on the floorboard, front and back, were
booklets containing designs for senior rings and samples of paper to choose
from for high school yearbooks and bulletins, and there were pamphlets
advertising photocopying machines, typewriters, and the like.
“Yeah, I know,” Hiram said. “I’m messy.”
When we backed out of the drive and hit the street and the merchandise
stopped shifting, Hiram said, “I didn’t want to say anything in front of
MeMaw, but actually, going over to see Fitz isn’t always that wonderful. He’s
a little quirky.”
“I thought as much when I met him. I mean, he was nice enough, just a little
fanatic.”
“That’s not all bad. I mean, he’s a good guy. But that’s why I was hoping
you’d come along. I’m not saying I mind boxing him or playing a game of chess
now and then, but he can be a little much sometimes.”
“I understand.”
“MeMaw is just crazy for church and religion though, bless her sweet heart,
so she always sort of invites me to go over there, I want to or not. She
thought Fitz’s old man was something special. Had the hot line to God.”
“But you didn’t think so?”
“Actually, the old man could put up a good front for someone when he wanted
to. I was around Fitz a lot when I was a kid, spent the night over there now
and then, and I saw the old man was kind of a bully. Never let the kid really
enjoy his childhood. Always had some kind of complaint. And he was very much a
hands-on person. He was hard on Fitz ’cause Fitz wasn’t his child.”
“A former marriage?” I asked.
Hiram shifted gears and shook his head. “I can’t figure why the old man
married Fitz’s mother. Didn’t seem a preacher’s type. She’d been a kind of
sportin’ woman before they met. I guess he liked the idea of transforming her
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from a Jezebel to a woman of God. Though I don’t know she changed all that
much. There were stories went around, and enough of them, so I figure where
there was smoke, there was fire.”
“What about Fitz’s real father?”
“Don’t know nothing about him. Neither does Fitz. He was some guy who bought
Fitz’s mother and did his job and left. Probably never even knew he’d made a
baby.”
We cruised by the East Side Market. The old man who owned the place was
sitting outside at the domino table, watching the street, perhaps planning his
strategy for when the rest of the players showed up.
I said, “So the Reverend is actually illegitimate?”
“Well, he got his stepfather’s name, of course. But strictly speaking, yeah.
I figure that’s what makes Fitz such a hardnose. He’s trying to live up to
something. The old man never let either Fitz or his mama forget where they
come from and what a big deed he was doin’ for them.”
I thought about the profile I had put together on the Reverend Fitzgerald. I
was beginning to think I should pursue a career in psychology. Of course, when
it came to putting together a profile on women, I’d have to pass. I understood
the secret life of the hummingbird better than I understood women.
I said, “The mom still around?”
“Fitz’s mama disappeared. Probably ran off. The old man got some kind of
cancer or something. Died slow. Lot of people thought God was paying him back
for the kind of man he was. As for Fitz, well, he’s got his good points. He’s
developed things to keep kids off the street. He’s real antidrug. He’s
introduced soccer and boxing and baseball and the carnival.”
“Carnival?”
“Yeah, I like the carnival myself. I go every year ’cause I’m here at just
the right time. There’s something about seeing black kids who can’t even
afford to get across town being able to walk over to the fairgrounds and have
a good time. And Fitz has a bus so he can pick up kids might not be able to
make it, or might have to walk through a bad section of town. He takes them
over there, and they haven’t got the money, he sees they get in and get some
rides.”
At mention of the carnival, something had shifted inside my head. I said,
“Saw a sign on the carnival. It’s next week, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Does it always take place sometime during the last week of August?”
“Yeah, it’s just for one night. One night is all can be afforded. Fitz gets
the local merchants to sponsor it, throw in donations. He raises money for it
other ways too. The carnival owners sell tickets to get in and for the rides,
but they’re cheap, so most anyone can afford it. It’s a little operation.
Black owned. Goes around to black communities. Fitz heard about it and made
the deal with them, so the carnival comes back every year. Wasn’t for Fitz,
lot of the kids here wouldn’t have anything going for them.”
I felt a sickness in the pit of my stomach. “How long ago was it Reverend
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Fitzgerald set this carnival business up?”
“Let’s see. Nine, ten years ago.”
“That’s real benevolent of him.”
“He’s got his good points. Like the way he protects his brother, T.J.”
“Brother?”
“Half-brother, actually. He’s retarded and about the size of a small army
tank.”
I thought of the big man Leonard and I had seen working in the yard outside
of the church.
“Rumor has it,” Hiram continued, “the boy wasn’t really the old man’s son
either, but that the wife had been slipping around again. I don’t know. Maybe
the Reverend wanted to believe she was slipping around. Man like him, it might
have been easier to believe that than believe his seed could be tainted, could
produce something like T.J. A giant with the mind of a poodle. Fitz, though,
he always treated T.J. special. Real special. T.J. didn’t have Fitz, he
wouldn’t last long. They got a serious bond.”
When we were close to the church and Reverend Fitzgerald’s house, Hiram said,
“This might be the last year I see Fitz. When MeMaw passes, I know I’m
through. Me and Fitz were kind of close when we were kids, but the older I
get, harder it is for me to connect with the guy.”
We parked in the church lot, and before we got out of the van, I said, “I got
a confession. Me and Leonard were over here the other day, like I said, but it
didn’t go that well. We came looking for someone Leonard’s uncle knew that
Reverend Fitzgerald was supposed to know, and well, Leonard and him didn’t hit
it off.”
“How bad did they not hit it off?”
“Hard to say. Fitzgerald was polite. No one came to blows, but it was a
little tense.”
“It was a point of religion?”
“That, and the fact that Leonard’s homosexual.”
Hiram was quiet for a time. “He’s queer?”
“That’s not a word he prefers.”
“Well, I didn’t mean nothing by it . . . I guess I didn’t. You queer?”
“No, I’m a Democrat when they’ve got the right people to vote for. Listen,
Hiram, Leonard’s a good guy. I don’t know what your deal is concerning
homosexuals, and frankly, I don’t care, but I wanted you to know what
happened.”
“Leonard seems all right.”
“He is. Gay guys come in all shades and types. Leonard’s one of the good
guys.”
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“It’s just a surprise.”
“I know.”
“He’s not like I thought a queer was. He’s like us, you know. I mean . . .
hell, I don’t know what I mean.”
“Nothing to know. I took you up on your offer to box so I could apologize to
the Reverend. Things could be a little awkward is what I’m saying. I figured I
ought to tell you now. You’re uncomfortable, you can drive me back.”
“No. No. I know how Fitz is. We’ll get through it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We got out of the van and walked around to the back of the church.
T.J., dressed in gray sweatpants and T-shirt and tennis shoes, was standing
at the back door and it startled me. He was just standing there, not moving.
His arms hung limp by his sides. He seemed to be waiting on something, or
considering some deep, forgotten secret that wouldn’t quite come to him. He
looked like a black golem. He lifted his huge arms slightly and his hands
flopped forward like catcher’s mitts on pegs.
Hiram said, “Fitz in, T.J.?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You remember me, T.J.?”
T.J. thought about it for a moment, and shook his head.
“That’s OK,” Hiram said. “Would you tell Fitz I’m here? Just say Hiram’s
here. He’s expecting me.”
The giant nodded, turned and opened the door, and disappeared inside. Hiram
turned to me, said, “Every year T.J. forgets who I am. He can only hold
certain kinds of thoughts for so long. Remembering me from year to year isn’t
one of them.”
A moment later T.J. came back, and Fitzgerald was with him. T.J. let
Fitzgerald go outside, then took his place in the doorway, filling it,
substituting for a door. Fitzgerald was wearing a white T-shirt and white
shorts and tennis shoes. He was grinning until he saw me. He looked at me,
then Hiram, then back to me. Slowly the grin came back.
“You decide I was right?” the Reverend said. “About wanting to hand your life
over to God?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I conned Hiram to get a ride over here. I wanted to
apologize for the other day. I’m sorry about how it went with you and my
friend.”
“Ah, yes. Him. Well, it didn’t go so bad. Apologies were made all around.
It’s over with.”
“I didn’t apologize,” I said, “and I wanted to. For me and him. We just got
sideways. It wasn’t our intent to step on your beliefs.”
“You didn’t. They’re too solid for that. And I don’t need an apology. I was
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merely trying to do what it’s my mission to do. Point out how God sees things.
Then let you, and your friend, take your own path. If you’re going to owe
anyone an apology, it’s God.”
“Maybe I’ll drop him a card,” I said, then immediately wished I hadn’t. I was
getting as bad as Leonard.
The Reverend, however, hadn’t lost his grin. He said, “You can laugh about
anything in this life, my friend, but in the next—”
“Hap boxes,” Hiram said. “He’s a friend. That’s why I brought him. To box.
Why don’t we just do that?”
“All right,” Fitzgerald said, “we can do that. T.J., move aside. You fellas
come on in.”
34.
The only light in the gym was the sunlight that came through high shutter
windows, and it was bright to the center of the gym, but there its reach
played out and the shadow took over, grew darker toward the far wall.
The Reverend took off his T-shirt and showed us a hard body, and said,
“Hiram, you and me. We’ll start easy, get warm.”
Hiram nodded, picked up some blue boxing gloves lying against the wall, and
put them on. They were the slip-on kind. No strings.
The Reverend pulled on a pair of red gloves, and he and Hiram moved toward
the center of the gym, and the line of light and shadow split them down the
middle, putting one side of their bodies in the light, the other in the dark,
but then they began to move, to bob and weave, to shuffle and dance, and they
were one moment in brightness, the next in shadow.
Back and forth, around and around, reaching out with the gloves, slow at
first, touching, jabbing, and then they came together and the blows were
smooth and soft and not too quick, and on the sidelines T.J. watched like an
attack dog, ready for the word.
They slugged and dodged and bobbed and weaved, and Hiram was, as he said, a
scrapper, not a boxer but a scrapper. He threw his punches wide and dropped
his hands, but he was fast and game and landed shots because of it. Fitzgerald
was somewhere between a boxer and a brawler. It was obvious he was holding
back. He could easily have been a retired heavyweight, a guy that might have
been a contender.
They eventually came together in the center of the gym, locked arms, and
began moving around and around in a circle, light and shadow, their foreheads
pushed together as if they were Siamese twins connected by flesh and brain
tissue. Around and around. T.J. carefully watching.
Finally Fitzgerald pushed Hiram away and smiled at him. “You’re a little
better, my man.”
“I been working out at a gym,” Hiram said when he got his breath. “But I’ve
had all I want.”
“You tire too easily,” Fitzgerald said.
“That’s the truth,” Hiram said.
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Fitzgerald looked at me. “You want to go?”
“Sure,” I said.
Fitzgerald turned to T.J. “Take it easy, T.J. It’s just fun.”
T.J. nodded, but there wasn’t anything on his face that showed he thought any
fun was going on. He didn’t relax a bit. Tiny rivers of sweat rolled down his
face, and he stood partially crouched.
“Kinda takes the thrill out of it with him at my back,” I said.
“He’s all right,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s just overly protective.”
I got the gloves from Hiram and pulled them on. They were sweaty inside, and
hot. It was starting to warm up in the gym, as the air-conditioning was off
and the air came from the same place as the light—the outside.
“You should go to church,” Fitzgerald said to me. “Everyone should go to
church.”
“How do you know I don’t?” I said. “I might preach somewhere. God might have
sent me here to whip your butt.”
“No,” he said, smiling. “I don’t think so. Your friend, he went to church, he
might realize the perversion of his homosexuality. He could change his ways.
There might be forgiveness from the Lord.”
“Might be?” I said.
I took up a southpaw position and we moved and threw some jabs, but there was
no real connection. Fitzgerald said, “There’s no true home in the House of the
Lord for the sodomite, young man.”
“Let it be, Fitz,” Hiram said from the sidelines. “Just box.”
I threw a quick jab and hit the Reverend on the forehead, and we started
shuffling about, looking for openings. I said, “You make homosexuality sound
like a true sin. Right up there with murderers, child molesters, false
prophets. You might as well include unmarried mothers and illegitimate
children.”
Fitzgerald studied me curiously. He jabbed and right-crossed and hooked.
Lightly. I blocked and countered with a weak combination.
We moved apart, he said, “There are some who are lost to the joys of heaven.
They have to be put aside.”
“Aside?” I said, and hooked him with a left to the gut, hooked him hard. He
covered and slid back. “What’s ‘aside’ mean, Reverend? You sound as if you’re
out to punish souls instead of save them.”
His face turned into a black Kabuki mask, and he came with a jab and a
crossing combination. I took it on the side of my face and rolled it, but it
still hurt. We weren’t playing tag now. I got my focus. I let myself settle. I
tried not to concentrate too much. I tried to relax and let the reflexes take
over. I thought too much, I was going to get hit while putting together a
combination. I had to react, not plan, and I had to remember not to kick. We
were boxing.
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I threw a jab and tried a hook, and Fitzgerald leaned away from the jab and
moved outside of the hook and came over my hand and hit me with a right cross
over the left eye.
I bobbed and weaved and let a couple of shots ricochet off me while I got it
together, then we were close and the fists were flying and I was distantly
aware of the sound of the gloves as they slapped on our sweaty flesh, and I
was aware of moving in and out of light and shadow, and finally, when he stood
in shadow and I stood in light, with the sun at my back, I decided to hold
him. I wasn’t going to move. He wasn’t coming into the light. He was going to
take what I had to give in shadow. Take it and like it.
I took a few myself and had to like it, but I had moved beyond pain. It was
going to take a damn good shot for me to feel it now. We weren’t playing. We
were hitting. Hiram said, “Hey, men, too much,” but we didn’t stop, we kept
slinging and the sound of the gloves became sweet, like a backbeat to good
music, and Fitzgerald tried to press hard, to move around me, to move into the
light, to push against me and bring himself to my side of the gym, but I
wouldn’t let him. He tied me up, I shoved him off and jabbed him. He tried to
circle, I hooked and crossed.
Hiram was calling something from the side, but I wasn’t aware of it anymore,
I couldn’t make sense of his words. There was a copper taste in my mouth. And
then there was a great shadow, like a cloud moving before the sun, and I knew
T.J. had slid up behind me, eclipsing my light, and I sensed him close to me,
ready to grab me, and I thought of those children, like rag dolls in his
hands.
Fitzgerald tried to bob and explode, like Smokin’ Joe Frazier, but when he
bobbed, I uppercut him solid enough to bring him on his toes, and I hooked him
on the jaw and was driving him back farther into shadow, going with him,
deeper into shadow, and he was in trouble, but holding up, and then I felt a
vise fasten around my body, trapping my arms to my sides, and I could smell
anxiety sweat as T.J. crushed me to him and the gym began to spin. I struggled
in his grasp, thought about stomping back and down to break his kneecaps, or
driving the back of my head into his face, but this was a friendly situation,
nothing serious here—a little out of hand, but friendly. Any second T.J. would
let go. He’d realize his brother was in no real trouble here. He’d drop me.
Someone would stop him.
The walls of the gym turned to hot liquid and flowed over me and the ceiling
fell down and light and shadow scrambled and there were bongos in my head and
I realized I had waited too late, because T.J. wasn’t going to put me down,
and I was too weak now to do anything about it.
Bright and dark, bending in upon themselves, whirling around and around to
the tune of blood pounding in my skull, and I had a flash of that dream where
I was underwater in the bookmobile with Illium and Chester and the dead boy
with the flesh floating away from his bones. . . .
* * *
When I awoke, I was on the floor of the gym. First thing I saw was Hiram. He
was leaning over me. He looked concerned. He said, “Hap, you OK?”
“Yeah,” I said.
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Fitzgerald came into view. “Sorry about T.J. Normally, he stays in check. He
got the feeling we were really into it. He squeezed your air out.”
“I know,” I said. “And wewere into it.”
I sat up slowly. The gym was only moving a little. My ribs were mildly sore.
I figured that would balance out the knot on my head I’d gotten the night
before. I’d certainly had an interesting two days, and it wasn’t even lunch
yet.
T.J. was standing against the far wall with his hands by his sides and his
head hung. He looked as passive as a puppet. I thought:Klaatu barada nikto.
“Yeah,” Fitzgerald said, “we were into it. It’s my turn to apologize again.
For T.J. And for going so hard, keeping up with the rhetoric. I guess I do
bear a little animosity for the other day, and I just can’t help but be a
preacher. By the way, you were putting it on me pretty good. But I’d have come
back.”
“Now we’ll never know, will we?”
“Maybe we’ll do it again sometime.”
I got up slowly with Hiram’s assistance. “It could happen,” I said.
* * *
On the way home, Hiram was quiet until we turned onto Comanche Street. He
said, “Man, there’s more than stuff between him and Leonard. What’s the deal
with you two, that’s what I want to know?”
“Bad chemistry,” I said.
35.
When we got back and I was out of the van telling Hiram ’bye, apologizing for
going in the first place and letting things escalate the way they did, I began
to feel a strange sensation.
It was partially due to the fact that Hanson’s car was parked at the curb
along with a pickup I didn’t recognize, and of course, I knew what that meant.
But there was something else, and I didn’t understand it until I was on Uncle
Chester’s porch about to open the door. Then it hit me.
The sensation was fear. Because now I knew what I thought I’d known all
along. Fitzgerald was a killer.
I had been with him and his giant brother, and I had been unconscious on the
floor of Fitzgerald’s gym. I had pushed certain buttons inside Fitzgerald and
inside myself, and it was possible I had fucked things up. I had let the
Reverend know I knew something was going on with him and the kids.
Perhaps all that had saved me and Hiram was the fact that Fitzgerald assumed
someone, like MeMaw, knew where we were going. Then again, had he been
inclined, he could have taken his chances, put us unconscious in Hiram’s van
and taken us for a little drive that ended at the bottom of some pond
somewhere—an exit like Illium’s. Maybe kiddie porn would be found in our
possession. And when the good Reverend was questioned, all he had to say was
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we never arrived. Or that we came and went.
Then again, that might have been too complicated in broad daylight, or
Fitzgerald may have figured me for nothing more than a belligerent sinner and
not worthy of action.
I felt like a fool attempting to beard the lion in his own den, but I felt
another thing now. An absolute certainty Fitzgerald, with the help of his poor
brother, was our killer. It all fit together too damn neat to be otherwise.
I was trembling by the time I discovered the front door was locked. I
realized Leonard and the others had gone on up to the Hampstead place.
I got a shovel off the back porch and went up there too, along the creek bed
and through the woods.
* * *
When I arrived at the Hampstead place, Hanson was there, along with his crew.
Unexpectedly, the retired coroner from Houston had brought his own crew. They
were dressed in white paper suits and gas masks with charcoal filters. The
front steps had been removed and a number of boards had been taken off the
porch. White suits were crawling under there, busy as grubs in shit.
Inside the house, down in the open trapdoor, Leonard and Charlie, wearing
paper suits and gas masks, were bringing out buckets containing dirt and worms
and dirty lard. The worms were long and red and very busy. Leonard put his
flashlight on the bucket, and I watched them squirm, like dancers under
spotlights. The odor that came from the bucket and from the dank dark below
was stronger than sun-hot road-kill.
“Where you been?” Leonard said through his mask. He sounded like Darth Vader.
“Visiting a friend.”
“Good time for it, asshole.”
“Sorry.”
“Hi, Hap,” Charlie said.
“Hi, Charlie. See you’re wearing those Kmart shoes.”
“Won’t leave home without ’em.”
“You see Mohawk . . . Melton, tell him Hap says hey, will you?”
“Absolutely.”
Hanson introduced me to the retired coroner, Doc Warren, an old wizened
white-haired guy who looked as if he might have been dug up himself. He had on
a paper suit and gloves. He was sitting on the floor by the trapdoor taking a
rest. He was sweaty and tired looking. His filtered mask was in his lap. There
were fragments of bone on a plastic drop-cloth beside him. Very small bones.
He didn’t bother to get up or shake my hand.
He said, “You and your friend have found quite a mess.”
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“Tell me about it,” I said.
Turned out they had located four bodies. One of them, the one that smelled,
the one I had first discovered, had been there about a year. As I had
suspected, something in the soil down there, the way the water flooded in, had
caused it to decay slowly, in spite of the East Texas heat. That lard in the
bucket was not lard at all. It had once been flesh. It was now the result of
decay and putrefaction. With the lard were bones. A child’s bones.
The rest of the bodies were not bodies at all, but bones, skeletal remains.
Warren estimated the other bones had been there some time. They were all the
bones of children. There was enough evidence to suggest the bodies had been
cut up and wrapped in cloth and put in cardboard boxes and wrapped in chicken
wire, then buried carefully.
“I believe you’ll find enough bones to make up for the missing kids from the
East Side,” I said. “Maybe more.”
“I believe you’re right,” Doc Warren said.
Leonard popped out of the hole. He said, “Hey, Hap, you gonna supervise, or
what?”
“Is the job open?”
“Ha,” Leonard said, and disappeared back into the trapdoor hole.
“You’ll need to slip on one of these paper suits, get a gas mask,” Hanson
said.
“You got to watch infection,” Warren said, “case there’s any more bodies with
meat on them. Streptococci likes to get in your lungs and into cuts. It can
fuck you up big time.”
I put on a paper suit and gas mask and went to work. It’s not a day I’ll
forget. Sometimes, even now, I awake from a dream where I’m crawling on my
belly beneath that old, rotten house, turning my shovel awkwardly in the dirt,
and the smell of that child, the one that was lard and bone, still seems
strong in my nostrils.
By nightfall we’d found the remains of nine children. And one large
skeleton—well, what was left of a large skeleton. Warren said it was a woman.
He estimated she had been there a long time. Thirty years or longer. Warren
concluded her skull had been cracked, and she had most likely been cut up the
same way as the kids. There were no immediate signs of cloth, but around her
remains was a coil of chicken wire.
Later, paper suits disposed of, back at Uncle Chester’s, we sat around and
drank coffee. The crew that had come along with Doc Warren had parked on the
far side of the woods, and when they finished for the day, they left that way.
I never saw them again. Hanson’s crew, a black man and woman who worked for
the fire department, departed in the pickup in the yard. I never saw them
again either. That left me and Leonard, Hanson, Warren, and Charlie.
We were sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee, and I was thinking
about those big fat red worms, wondering how long it would take them to work
their way into my coffin when I was dead, and trying to tell myself it didn’t
matter, when Hanson said, “Something licks the bag here. That woman’s body
being that old, the killer would have to have started when he was a kid.
Unless he’s a geriatric fucker.”
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“Watch your mouth,” Warren said.
“No offense,” Hanson said.
“Yeah, well,” Warren said, “I get my feelings hurt easy.”
“But that’s right, ain’t it?” Hanson said. “Same M.O.”
“It’s passed down,” Warren said. “Just a fucking minute.” Warren put his
fingers in his mouth and plucked out his false teeth and put them on the table
by his coffee cup. “Sonofabitches are a bad fit,” he said, and his lips
flapped like flags in the wind.
“Goddamn,” Leonard said, “put ’em back. I’m trying to drink my coffee here.”
Warren ignored him. When he talked, he could be understood, but it sounded as
if he had a rag in his mouth.
“You see, I think the original murder, the woman, was done by someone who had
a child helping. Took him up there, showed him how to do it. Sanctified it
somehow in the child’s mind—”
“And he’s repeating it,” Hanson said.
“Yep,” Warren said. “Good ole Freudian stuff. ’Course, nothing says the
murderer has to be a man, or that it was a boy that saw him do it, but I’d bet
you money. I’d say too, whoever did this is some kind of religious nut, and
he’s got that and this ritual, this murder he saw take place as a child, all
twisted up in his head. That water stain up there looking like it does, and
his first impression of it coming to him as a child, well, it could have had
quite an impact.”
“I think I understood all that,” Hanson said. “But . . . Christ, I’m with
Leonard, put your teeth back in.”
Doc Warren ignored him, sipped his coffee. He sounded like a pig at the
trough, way his loose lips flopped.
“Hap gets anA in Psychology 101,” Charlie said, “but so what?”
“Yeah, well,” Warren said, “lots of folks think Freud was full of shit. Not
everyone who’s seen bad stuff as a child responds by becoming bad. Maybe this
psychology stuff is all horseshit, and whoever is doing this just likes doing
it. Which brings us to the fearful question that there may in fact be real
evil in the world. No one likes that idea. Everything has to have cause and
effect, and maybe it does. But why do some people respond to evil with evil,
while others do not?”
“Personally,” Leonard said, “I don’t give a shit. I’ve always believed in
evil, and I don’t need religion to believe it. I just want this guy. And I
want you to put your fuckin’ teeth in, Doc.”
Warren sipped more coffee.
Hanson looked at Leonard, said, “I’m with you. On the teeth and this guy too.
You say you want him, so isn’t it about time you tell the rest of it? I know
there’s more. I’ve stood for all the dicking around I’m gonna take.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “there’s more.”
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I said, “Allow me, Leonard. I got something to add you don’t know about.”
“This have to do with where you were this morning?” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said. “OK, Doc. I think you see it the way it is. Let me run over
your territory and fill it in some more. Say there’s this preacher, a real
do-gooder in some ways, but you see, he comes from a background where his
father was a religious nut too. Say the father wasn’t actually the father, but
a stepfather. The stepfather married this woman with a child, and this woman’s
child was a bastard. She was a prostitute, or at least a loose woman. The
preacher, the stepfather, he thinks he can do right by her, show her the way
of God. And perhaps, down deep, a whore is exactly what he’s looking for. With
me so far?”
“We’re with you,” Hanson said.
“So he marries the woman, but he can’t reconcile the shame. He treats her
badly. He treats the boy badly. He never lets them forget that she’s a slut
and the boy’s a bastard, and that he’s doing them special as the right hand of
the Lord. The woman gets pregnant again. The child is retarded. The preacher
can’t stand it. He can’t accept his seed would produce such a child. Now he
has two bastards, and one of them has the sense of a cement block. He gets it
in his mind the woman’s gone back to her old ways, that she’d been with
another man. Maybe she has, maybe she hasn’t. It doesn’t matter. The preacher
broods, and one night something sets him off, and in a moment of anger he
strikes and kills the woman.”
“And the stepson sees it,” Doc Warren said.
“Yeah. And let’s say the preacher knows the boy saw it, but instead of
killing the boy, who’s already warped enough to think his father is God
incarnate, he forces the child, or the child is willing, psychologically
browbeat, however you want to put it . . . But say the boy goes along with the
father to help get rid of the body. The father makes a religious ritual out of
it. Perhaps to cover his guilt to the boy, to himself, both, or maybe he
really believes that he’s done the righteous will of the Lord.
“Out of brutality, or convenience, the preacher cuts the woman up to fit in a
cardboard box, wraps her body parts in a cloth and takes her to this abandoned
house he knows about, wraps the body in chicken wire, to keep the animals out
of it, probably in cloth too, like the others, buries her under the house.
Later, she comes up missing, he says she ran off. She’s got a reputation to go
with this possibility. What he was ashamed of before, now protects him. She
was just a whore. She used a good man. She ran off and left him with two sons
to raise, one of them retarded. See where I’m going?”
“This is guesswork, right?” Hanson said.
“Some of it,” I said. “And now it takes up where you left off, Doc. The boy
is continuing to do that work in his own way, copying his stepfather’s
pattern.”
“Why isn’t he killing women then?” Hanson said. “Me and Doc here, we dealt
with a guy in Houston once, called himself the Houston Hacker. He had a thing
against women, and women were all he killed, ’less someone got in the way.
This kid sees his father kill a woman, why’s he killing kids? Wouldn’t he have
a thing against women because his stepfather did, even if it was his mother?”
“That’s easy,” Doc Warren said. “He’s killing himself. He’s killing the nine-
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or ten-year-old fatherless, unwanted child that he was. Killing him in the
righteous manner his stepfather killed his mother. He’s not associating the
crime with women, he’s associating it with the evil of what she produced. A
bastard. Himself. And somewhere, deep inside, he’s maybe killing himself
because his existence is what turned the stepfather against the woman in the
first place.”
“It has a nice ring to it,” Charlie said. “It sounds like bullshit to me, but
it rings nicely. It’d sound better you had them teeth in, though, Doc.”
“What about the page of Psalms in the kid porn mags?” Doc Warren said.
“You’re suggesting this isn’t a sex crime, but one of religious psychosis, so
what’s with that?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the whole thing has turned sexual for
him. Somehow he’s cleansing himself of that sinful preoccupation by getting
rid of his magazines and destroying their power with a page of the Psalms.
Like a cross in a vampire’s grave. I really don’t know. But here’s another
piece of the puzzle. The retarded child grew up to be only slightly smaller
than the Empire State Building. He does what his brother tells him. He helps
him do this thing he does. And they do it every summer, last week of August.
Which is, probably, about the same time of year the first murder occurred, the
mother’s murder, and coincidently it’s a great time of opportunity for our
man. It’s the week the East Side carnival comes to town, something our man
helps sponsor.”
“I’ll be damned,” Leonard said.
“Now for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Hanson said. “Who the hell
is it?”
“A fella I went to visit this morning,” I said. “The guy who killed Illium
Moon, and would have tried to kill Chester Pine if Chester hadn’t died first.
A preacher’s son.The preacher’s son. A preacher himself. Reverend Fitzgerald
of the First Primitive Baptist Church.”
36.
Space suits in daylight. Red worms in flashlight, writhing and twisting in
dark, odoriferous lard. . . .
That night I lay in bed and remembered all that. It was not conducive to
sleep.
I got up and went into the kitchen for a drink and saw Leonard had not made
the couch into a bed. He was sitting on it watching television. The screen
jumped with snow and rattled with static.
The movie he was watching was coming from a long ways, and the cheap rabbit
ears weren’t picking it up too well. I could see it clear enough to make out
noble German shepherds crawling on their bellies toward some nasty space
aliens. I recognized the movie.I Married a Monster from Outer Space. It had
scared me when I was a kid. I doubted any monster movie would scare me again.
I forgot the drink of water and went over to the couch and sat down by
Leonard. He didn’t look at me. I saw in the reflected light of the television
screen that he had tears in his eyes.
I turned my attention to the TV set. The aliens were catching hell now, both
from German shepherds and good-old American citizens who weren’t going to
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stand for no space aliens messin’ with their women.
I said, “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Uncle Chester?”
“Yeah.”
We sat until the end of the movie and then another one started up. This one
was about a guy that got some kind of radiation on him and grew incredibly big
and had to wear a loin-cloth.
Leonard said, “What about you and Florida?”
“What about us?”
“That bad?”
“She just wants to be friends. I don’t know how you fags work, but a gal
wants to be your friend after you’ve been fucking her, it usually means she
doesn’t want to be anything to you but gone.”
“I’m usually the one wants to be friends. I used to want a relationship.
These days, the shit I’ve been through, except when I have a hard-on, celibacy
seems acceptable and preferable. You, on the other hand, don’t feel that way.
If ever there was a guy wanted to be married and have two kids and a dog in
the yard, it’s you.”
“Call me transparent.”
The big guy on the screen was starting to have some serious trouble with the
U.S. Army. They were blasting the shit out of him.
“This murder case,” Leonard said, “how do you think we did?”
“It’s not over, but I think we did all right. Hanson believes he solves this
case he’ll be in for a promotion. Him and Charlie both.”
“Charlie don’t think that. Told me he’s put in applications at burger joints,
claims he’s one hell of a cook.”
“What Charlie is, is full of shit.”
“Hap, what if we’re wrong, and it ain’t Fitzgerald?”
“It’s him. And his brother too, though I don’t know you can count T.J. as
knowing what he’s doing. He’s like a fuckin’ golem. Just does what he’s told.”
“We got so much circumstantial evidence, Hanson could get a warrant. Look
around the church and Fitzgerald’s house. That might be better than this plan
of nabbing the Reverend at the carnival with a kid in hand. Whatcha want to
bet Hanson gets a warrant, looks hard enough, he’ll find some dead kid’s
underwear with the Reverend’s cum in ’em?”
“But if he doesn’t, then the motherfucker’s tipped off and he can get real
careful. Hanson plays it his way, he just might nab him. Fitzgerald puts his
hands on a kid, kidnaps him, then Hanson’s got something to work with, a
righteous reason to bring the bastard in. Then, with a little luck, the rest
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of it will come out.”
“We’re out of this now, right?”
“You betcha.”
“Hap, not that I’m petty or anything, but I told you Uncle Chester wasn’t the
one.”
“I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
“I’m a good judge of character.”
“I’m proof of that.”
Leonard was silent for a moment. “Well, even I fuck up now and then.”
* * *
The All Black Carnival came to the East Side on a hot morning that threatened
storm. The storm lay in the west, dark as an army boot, and the heavens
rattled with poisonous thunder.
Our fear was the storm blew in, the carnival might be canceled, and if that
happened, Hanson’s plan was gone with the wind, and the Reverend would have to
wait for another night. Strike somewhere unexpected.
Me and Leonard were out of it, but we couldn’t resist the temptation to drive
over to the fairgrounds early that morning and watch the carnival trucks pull
in behind the tall chain-link fence, observe the machineries of fun going up:
the Tilt-a-Whirl, the coaster rides, the Slingshot, as well as rides I
couldn’t put a name to.
I kept wondering how Fitzgerald was nabbing those kids and getting them away
from there to commit murder. He was a high-profile individual. People on the
East Side knew him well and weren’t likely to forget him walking off with some
kid, but somehow, every year, he was grabbing a kid and taking him up to that
death house.
How was he choosing his victim? Was the kid someone Fitzgerald had been
watching, someone who’d been attending church activities? Someone Fitzgerald
knew would be going to the carnival? Someone whose home life was a disaster,
or someone who had no home life at all? Someone whose past would indicate
anything could have happened? Someone like the little boy under Uncle
Chester’s floor?
I tried to tell myself it wasn’t my problem now. It was Hanson’s. We drove
back home.
About two in the afternoon, Leonard and I went over to MeMaw’s, and Hiram
helped us finish up the porch. There wasn’t a lot left to do. About an hour’s
work. It was very hot. The sky was clear and blue except in the west, and from
those brooding clouds there came a kind of mugginess that was almost
overwhelming, and I couldn’t get my mind off the on-coming night and the
carnival and what might happen. I hit my thumb with the hammer three or four
times, dropped boards and nails, and cussed enough Hiram had to ask me to
stop.
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“No offense, Hap,” Hiram said. “But I don’t talk that way, and don’t want
that kind of talk around Mama. She might hear you.”
I apologized, truly embarrassed for making Hiram uncomfortable. I hoped MeMaw
hadn’t heard me.
When we had driven the last nail, Hiram said, “Come on in. Mama’ll want y’all
to have some ice tea.”
“I need it,” I said.
Hiram went inside, and Leonard and I promised to follow, after picking up a
few nails and boards. When Hiram was out of sight, Leonard said, “I’m fucking
ashamed of you, all that cussing.”
“Yeah, well, you can eat shit.”
Then we heard Hiram yell for us from inside the house.
“Hap! Leonard! Oh, God! Come here, quick!”
We rushed inside. MeMaw was slumped in a kitchen chair, almost falling off of
it. There was a pool of urine in the seat of the chair, dripping on the floor.
Her walker was turned over, as if she had let go of it in the act of trying to
rise.
The stroke had come swift and silent, lethal as a black mamba. She was alive,
but comatose. We stretched her out on the floor and packed a pillow behind her
head and called the ambulance. They came quick, hauled her off to Memorial
Hospital. We followed after, Hiram in his van, me and Leonard in my truck.
At the hospital, we sat with Hiram in the waiting room while the doctors did
their work. Which wasn’t much. The bottom line was MeMaw was old and it didn’t
look good. All they could do—all we could do—was wait.
When we got the word, me and Leonard went into ICU with Hiram and looked at
MeMaw. She was wired up like a spaceman and seemed to be smaller and frailer
than was humanly possible. I was somehow reminded of those pictures you see of
Mexican mummies, the ones that have been exhumed and put on display because
the relatives couldn’t afford to maintain the burial plot. I noted the liver
spots on her hands. Why hadn’t I noticed them before? They looked like old
pennies viewed through weak coffee.
We stayed for a while, then Leonard said, “Hiram, we’ll check back. You need
anything, just ask.”
“Yeah,” Hiram said. “Thanks. Man, I can’t believe this. I mean, I can. Her
being old and all, but I can’t believe it either.”
“I know,” Leonard said.
“Need us to call relatives?” I asked.
“No,” Hiram said. “A few minutes, I’ll do that.”
We left Hiram sitting by MeMaw’s bedside, holding her hand.
37.
Late that afternoon, the storm in the west really started to boil, turned
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darker, and moved our way. We were sitting on the porch glider, watching it,
when Hanson drove up.
He walked up on the porch with his cigar in his mouth. The end of it was
dead, but I could tell it had recently been lit. There were ashes all over his
cheap sports coat.
I said, “I thought you quit smoking.”
“I did,” he said, “and I just did again. Listen here, I wanted to tell you
it’s going down. You deserve that much. It’s all over, I’ll tell you how it
went.”
“We’d appreciate that,” Leonard said.
He nodded, turned, and looked toward the storm clouds. “Man,” he said.
“It’s moving slow,” Leonard said. “Things could still go all right, he makes
his move soon enough.”
“Yeah, well,” Hanson said, “see you.”
He went out to his car, and I watched as he lit the cigar and took up smoking
again before he drove away.
“Nice guy,” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thing I like best about him is he took my woman and he sucks
on a nasty old cigar. Asshole.”
We watched the storm some more, then got in Leonard’s car and drove over to
the First Primitive Baptist Church, telling each other all the way over we
were just going to have a look.
We didn’t pull up out front of the place but parked a block down. There
wasn’t much to see from there, but before we parked, we drove by once, and I
was able to see that the bus and the Chevy were still in the yard. I also
noted that a block up from the church, parked on the opposite side of the
street, facing the wrong way, was what looked like an unmarked police car. I
didn’t recognize the balding white guy behind the wheel, but he looked like a
cop and he had his eyes on the church. I thought it was a good thing
Fitzgerald wasn’t expecting anything. This guy was about as inconspicuous as a
pink pig in overalls.
We drove on by and went around the block and came back the other way and
parked. From where we sat we could see the church and we could see the cop
car. Gradually we saw less of both. It turned dark and the storm clouds from
the west turned it darker yet.
After a while, lights came on inside the church, then outside of it, lighting
up the driveway. An hour passed and cars began to pull up at the curb, and
one, a tan Volkswagen, drove around back. Men and women and kids got out of
the cars and walked up to the church, around the side of it, and out of sight.
Another fifteen minutes went by, and men and women came away from the church
without their kids, got in their cars, and drove away. I thought about that.
Parents bringing their kids to a safe place, the church. Leaving them with
someone safe, the Reverend, assured in their hearts that their kids were off
to have a good time.
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And most likely they were. It wasn’t the loved kids the Reverend wanted, so
just exactly what was the Reverend’s game? Figuring what he did want made my
head hurt.
A minute or two later, the short bus came out from behind the church with its
lights on. I could see the Reverend driving, glimpsed the shadowed forms of
kids through the windows. The bus turned left and drove past the cop car and
on down the street.
The cop car fired up quick and pulled around in the center of the street and
went after the bus. Mr. Sneak. He might as well have been standing on a
bucket, jerking his dick and singing a song.
Leonard cranked up and we followed after. Actually, neither we nor the cop
had to be sneaky. The bus did what we expected it to do. It drove straight to
the carnival, paused at the gate and went on into the fairgrounds. So far,
things were going as expected.
Not having a special pass, we, along with the cop, parked outside of the
fence, and walked up to the gate. When we got there, we were standing behind
the cop. The guy at the gate, a black guy with a physique like the Pillsbury
Dough Boy and black glasses with white tape on the nose bar, wouldn’t let the
cop in because he didn’t have a dollar. The cop, a hard-boiled guy wearing
what was once called a leisure suit, a style of clothing that went out of
favor and production not long after the demise of the seventy-five-cent
paperback, wanted to show him his badge and let that do.
“I don’t need a badge,” said the fat gatekeeper. “I need a dollar.”
“Listen, this is police business,” the cop said.
“You’re shittin’ me,” the gatekeeper said. “The carnival’s police business?”
“Here,” I said, handing the gatekeeper a dollar. “Let him in for heaven’s
sake. You’re holding up the line.”
The gatekeeper took the dollar. The cop eyed us the way cops do, said thanks
like he didn’t mean it, and went inside. The gatekeeper said to me, “Man, look
at this, two white guys back to back, ain’t that some kind of lucky omen or
something?”
“Two white guys, one in an ugly leisure suit, means it’s going to rain,” I
said.
“I can believe that,” the gatekeeper said, “That guy, I don’t think he’s on
cop business at all. I think he’s too used to free meals and shit. That might
work uptown, but not here. And where’d he get that suit? What the hell color
was that anyway?”
“Orange or rust or dirty gold,” Leonard said. “Take your pick.”
We paid and went inside. We saw the cop walking toward the lot where the
permitted vehicles were parked. He walked wide of the lot and onto the pea
gravel, went over and leaned against the fence where the carnival lights were
weak, got a cigarette out, lit it, and tried not to act as if he was looking
at the bus. He wasn’t very good at it.
The bus door opened and Fitzgerald got off the bus, and a line of loud,
excited kids came out behind him, followed by a pretty, middle-aged black
woman. I assumed she was one of the kid’s mothers, helping the Reverend out.
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The kids, mostly six to ten years in age, evenly split between girls and
boys, bounced on their toes and stood in a line that gyrated like a garter
snake on a hot rock. The woman and Reverend Fitzgerald chatted amiably. He
smiled. She smiled. The Reverend went back to the bus and leaned inside, then
leaned out. I thought maybe he had said something to someone inside. T.J.
perhaps. From where we stood, no one was visible, but the plywood window
replacements in the back and on the side could have hidden them.
The Reverend smiled at the woman again. They spoke. Half the kids went with
her, the other half with the Reverend. Mr. Leisure Suit followed after the
Reverend and his charges. T.J., the walking eclipse, did not make an
appearance.
Me and Leonard were trying to decide what we were going to do next, when
Hanson walked up and surprised us. “You assholes,” he said. We turned and got
a look at him. He was his usual pleasant-looking self, but he no longer had
his cigar. I presumed it was in his pocket. I hoped he remembered to put it
out before he put it up. “Didn’t I just see you fucks? I said I’d let you
know.”
“I’ll say this,” Leonard said, “you walk light for a big dude.”
“It’s my fuckin’ Indian blood. What you two doin’ here? I said you were out.
You done more than you’re supposed to already.”
“And very well, I might add,” said Leonard.
“Don’t let your dicks get too hard,” Hanson said. “You did all right, but you
had some luck.”
“So did you,” I said. “We came along.”
“You didn’t even know for sure you had a case before we showed up,” Leonard
said.
“I still don’t know I got anything,” Hanson said.
“Bullshit,” I said.
“All right,” Hanson said, “you’re goddamn wizards of detection. Now go home
or take in the carnival. I want you out of my way. I mean it now. I got men on
the job, and they even know what they’re doin’. Well, they got an idea,
anyway.”
We left Hanson and walked around the carnival. It was bright with lights and
the sounds of voices and the cranking of machinery and the blasting of music,
presumably conceived by ears of tin and played on matching instruments. There
was the smell of sweat from excited children and tired adults, the butter-rich
aroma of popcorn and the sugar-sick sweetness of cotton candy, the burning
stench of fresh animal shit from the petting zoo.
We were over by the petting zoo when we came across Hiram. He was standing
there with his hands in his pockets, looking forlorn as a man who’d just
prematurely ejaculated. He was looking at a spotted goat.
We walked up beside him. I said, “Hiram.”
He turned and looked at me, but it took him a moment to know I was there.
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“Oh, hi,” he said.
“Surprised to see you here,” Leonard said.
“Mama’s with my sister. She drove down.”
“How is MeMaw?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Same. Doctor said she could stay like that awhile. A day,
six months.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Me too,” Leonard said.
“I had to get out, you know?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “Nothing wrong with that. There’s not a lot you can do.”
“I just needed a break,” he said. “Even if I just end up watching a goat.”
Hiram turned back to watch the goat, and a little boy came up and started
petting it. We stood there in awkward silence for a time, then said good-bye
and slipped away.
“Too bad,” Leonard said as we bought cotton candy. “I like MeMaw and Hiram.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but she lived a full life. We all got to check out
sometime.”
“It’s not dying I hate for her,” Leonard said. “It’s lingering. I think we
embarrassed Hiram.”
“Yeah, he feels guilty. Like he ought to be with her, but there’s just so
much of the deathwatch a person can take.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“This cotton candy is making me sick.”
I guess we wandered around for a couple of hours. We saw the Reverend and his
kids and their leisure-suited shadow a few times, but the Reverend didn’t see
us. We saw Melton, aka Mohawk, walking with a young black girl who looked as
if she had not long back abandoned her training bra and dolls. They went
around behind a hot dog stand and we lost sight of them. We saw Hanson a few
times. He looked as sullen as ever, as if the sight of us was causing his nuts
to shrink.
As we strolled, a lot of blacks looked at me like I was an exotic animal,
maybe belonged in the petting zoo. And in a way, I suppose I was exotic, least
here and on this night. There were only a handful of white people at the
carnival, and some of them were cops.
Another hour passed, and you could smell the storm on the warm night wind. It
mixed with the other aromas and became a heady cocktail. You could taste
electricity in the air. The machinery that wound around and around and took
the children up into the sky and back down again, creaked and whined and
groaned and squeaked and rattled bolts in its metal joints and made me
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nervous. Off in the distance, amid that swirling darkness, was the occasional
flash of lightning, like a liquid tuning fork thrown against the sky.
Not long after the lightning flashes, the machineries stopped and the rides
got canceled. All that was left was the petting zoo and the booths where you
lost your money trying to throw softballs into bushel baskets or baseballs
through hoops.
A half-hour later they canceled the whole thing and disgruntled patrons were
moving toward the gate. Before we got out of there, the rain blew in, came
faster and harder than anyone would have expected. Through the sheets of
aluminum-colored rain, the lights of the carnival were like winking gold coins
at the bottom of a fountain, and now there was nothing to smell but the rain,
and the rain was cold, and within seconds Leonard and I were soaking wet.
We made our way through the crowd and out to the car. We sat there and
watched as people rushed out and cars pulled away. We watched as the short
church bus came through the gate and drove off. We drove off after it.
The deluge was intense, and the bus drove slowly, and so did we, and so did
Leisure Suit. He was following behind us. After a little bit, we decided to
beat the bus back to the church, get our parking place. As we passed, Leonard
said, “Hap, the Reverend ain’t driving. It’s that woman. I don’t see him at
all.”
I drove on around, tires sloshing and tossing water. “Don’t mean he isn’t
there. I didn’t see the woman when they left the church. He could be in back.”
“Yeah, but . . . I don’t know. Something sucks the big ole donkey dick here.”
We beat the bus, got our parking place, turned off the lights, and sat there
and ate from a box of M&Ms Leonard had left in the glove box. They had melted
into a colorful mess, but we ate them anyway. We were licking our fingers when
the bus drove up to the church and stopped in the driveway.
“Reckon they’re staying close to the curb to help the parents out,” Leonard
said. “Kids are already soaked to the bone.”
Leisure Suit drove over to the curb opposite the church and parked facing the
wrong way.
“Cop is less smart now than he was earlier,” Leonard said. “I don’t think
he’s even made us yet, ain’t figured we been riding around behind him and
paying his way into the carnival. Mr. Sneaky, he don’t see any connection
between us and him and the bus.”
“As the day wears on,” I said, “a cop’s brain settles. It’s kind of like
sediment.”
“And he ain’t fueled by the magic of melted M&Ms.”
“There’s that too.”
“Ain’t the green M&Ms supposed to do something to you?” Leonard said. “I
always heard you had to watch the green ones.”
“The guy at the factory, he jacks off in the juice makes the green ones,
that’s what I heard.”
“No,” Leonard said, “that’s the mayonnaise at McDonald’s, or Burger King, or
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one of those places. It’s supposed to be a black man does it. That way it
scares the shit out of the peckerwoods, ’cause the black customers, they’re in
on it, it’s a conspiracy-type thing. They know to hold the mayonnaise. The
white folks, they don’t all know about it, so some of ’em eat it. Oh, and the
black guy, he’s got AIDS.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. Ain’t that awful, a nigger with AIDS jacking off in the poor honkie
folks’ mayonnaise?”
“A queer nigger, of course?”
“Without question. And he’s ugly too.”
38.
We sat there until our asses and the seatcovers seemed one and the same, then
the cars started to arrive and park at the curb, beating their wipers against
the rain.
It was hard to see with the rain the way it was, but we could see kids come
off the bus and rush into cars, and those cars would go away, then more would
show up, and a new flock of kids would come off the bus, and pretty soon all
the cars were gone, and no more came. The bus cranked up, turned on its
lights, drove to the back of the church.
“What now?” Leonard said.
Before I could answer, the tan Volkswagen, which I had forgotten about, came
out from behind the church and turned left. The church lights gave me enough
of a view to tell the driver was the woman who had been driving the bus, and
she had a little girl with her. Mom, having done her duty, was on her way home
with her own child.
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t think the Reverend was on the bus when it
came back. He could have got off out back just now, but I don’t think so. I
think he stayed at the carnival.”
“We’ve been hoodwinked, and not on purpose,” Leonard said. “I can’t figure
how Fitzgerald did it exactly, but he had prearranged plans with the woman. I
don’t mean she was in on it—”
“I know what you mean. He had her drive the kids back, but he had a kid in
mind wasn’t on the bus.”
“Someone won’t be missed. Some kid he gave a free pass to. And he had another
way of leaving the carnival other than the bus.”
“If we’re right,” I said, “where does that leave us?”
“With the clock ticking,” Leonard said.
We sat silent for a moment, then almost in unison said: “The Hampstead
place.”
Leonard drove us by the cop in the leisure suit. He was still watching the
church. He didn’t even blink as we went by.
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* * *
We made our way to the Hampstead place from Uncle Chester’s. Up through the
woods on foot. The rain hadn’t slacked, and it was slow going. The wind had
picked up and turned surprisingly cool, and it tossed the rain hard as gravel.
Tree branches whipped and cut us, and our single flashlight did little to
punch a hole in the darkness. We hadn’t taken the time to get rain slickers,
so we were soaked to the skin. I wished now we’d bothered to get guns. But all
we’d brought were ourselves and the flashlight in Leonard’s car.
When we got to the Hampstead place, we were exhausted. We didn’t want
Fitzgerald and his brother to see us coming, so I turned off the flashlight
just before we broke out of the woods, into the partial clearing.
Out there, with no light, pitch dark without moon or starlight, the rain
hammering us like ball bearings, we only had our instincts to guide us. It was
rough going. We could hear the boards in the old house creaking, begging the
wind to leave it alone, and we linked arms and let those sounds guide us. I
barked a shin on a porch step, and Leonard followed suit. We climbed onto the
porch, trying to be as quiet as possible, which was difficult when you felt
like your leg was broken. We found our way along the porch to the busted-out
window we had used before, cautiously crawled inside.
Rain was driving into the house from the hole in the ceiling and the hole in
the roof above. It was so dark inside we couldn’t see the rain, but we could
hear it and feel it. We listened for other sounds, the sounds of movement, but
there was only the wind and the expected creaking of lumber.
We had no recourse but to turn on the flash, and we used it to avoid the
breaks in the boards, but still they squeaked as we walked. We went through
the room with the chifforobe and into the kitchen, and it was dry there, and I
realized suddenly that my nerves were starting to settle. The pounding rain
had been like a severe case of Chinese water torture.
But as soon as we were both inside the kitchen, not really expecting to find
anyone since we’d heard neither movement or seen illumination, my flashlight
caught a shadow on my left, and I whipped the light that way, and the shadow
came at me. I swung the flashlight, and there was a grunt and a shattering of
bulb, and the light went out. Then I felt hands on me. I shifted my body and
jabbed with an elbow and then there was light on the right of me and I saw
Leonard out of the corner of my eye, and he was planting a side kick in a
man’s mid-section, and in that same instant my hands felt their way around my
injured attacker’s body, and I hip-threw him hard against the floor. Then a
light shot up at me from the floor, and behind the light the shadow shape
said, “Goddamn you, Hap.”
It was Charlie.
* * *
The cop Leonard kicked was named Gleason. I had seen him the day they tore
Uncle Chester’s flooring up. He was the fat cop with the bad toupee Mohawk had
yelled at. He wasn’t any slimmer, and now his bad toupee was wet and in the
light of his and Charlie’s flashlight, it looked like some kind of strange
tribal skullcap.
Leonard had really planted that kick. Gleason took a long time to start
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breathing naturally, but the guy had enough fat nothing got broken. Charlie
wasn’t feeling that good either. He had a knot on the side of his head where I
had connected with the flashlight.
“Man, that flashlight hurt,” Charlie said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Goddamn, you motherfuckers are quick.”
“How’s the head?” I said.
“It hurts, what’ya think?” Charlie rubbed the knot on his head. “Goddamn.”
“Sorry, Charlie. If it’s any consolation, I think you broke Leonard’s
flashlight.”
“Yeah, well, buy another. My head, I just got this one. What the fuck you two
doing here?”
We told him.
“You think Hanson didn’t think of covering this place?” Charlie said. “Jesus,
we may not be the incredibly clever sleuths you boys are, but we think of a
few things. We even brought along a lunch.”
“Charlie forgot the chips, though,” Gleason said. “I told him twicet about
the chips, and he still forgot ’em. A sandwich without chips ain’t no good.”
“Would you lose the chips, Gleason?” Charlie said.
“I just said you forgot is all,” Gleason said.
“The point here is not that I forgot the chips out of our lunch,” Charlie
said, “it’s that you two morons are screwing stuff up.”
“I told you we’re sorry,” I said. “Jesus, what you want us to do, shoot
ourselves?”
“You could have fucked up an investigation.”
“Considering Fitzgerald hasn’t showed yet,” Leonard said, “I think things are
already fucked.”
“Man,” Gleason said, “I think this guy busted something inside.”
Charlie put the light on Gleason. “You’re all right. Lose some fuckin’
weight. And take off that stupid toup.”
“He ought to leave it,” Leonard said. “The bad guys show up, he can scare ’em
with it.”
“Yeah, well, you guys laugh,” Gleason said. “I had this special fitted.”
“Fitted for what?” Leonard said. “A fence post? You got more head than you
got hair there. You need to shoot and field-dress another mop, pal.”
“Right, you’re Vidal Sassoon,” Gleason said.
And that’s when we heard someone coming through the woods from the back of
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the house.
“The lights,” Charlie said, and he killed the flash and Gleason killed his.
We listened as the tromping came closer.
Charlie whispered, “Spread out, here’s you guys’ chance to use that karate
shit on someone deserves it.”
We spread out. I took position by the door that led into the kitchen. I knew
Charlie was somewhere to the left of me, and Leonard and Gleason were across
the way.
We waited and the tromping went on around the side of the house and onto the
front porch, then we heard the porch boards squeak, and not long after, the
inside boards squeaked louder. The squeaking came our way. I felt the hair on
the back of my neck bristle and there was a tightening of the groin and a
loosening of the bowels. A light came from the room with the chifforobe, and
the light bobbed into the kitchen, and a man came after it. Then the light
swung to the right and its beam fell square and solid on Gleason, standing
there like a stuffed bear, his toupee dangling off his skull like an otter
clinging to a rock.
“Hey,” the startled man with the light said, and it was Fitzgerald’s voice,
and for a moment, time was suspended. Then time came loose and from behind
Fitzgerald a monstrous shadow charged into the room, and I moved, and everyone
else moved, and I realized then that someone was running away from the
chifforobe room, someone who had been with Fitzgerald and his brother, someone
who had panicked.
I started to go after him, but I couldn’t get past the Reverend, so I stepped
in and hit him with a right cross to the jaw and he dropped the flashlight and
staggered across the room and Gleason grabbed him. When I hit him, the flash
hit the floor and went around and around, showing Gleason and the Reverend,
then shadow, then light, then the flash quit rolling and pinned them.
The big shadow was T.J., of course, and when Gleason grabbed Fitzgerald, T.J.
grabbed Gleason, got him by the head with his huge hands, held it like it was
a basketball he was about to shoot.
I heard the one who got away fall through some boards in the front room,
heard him grunt and scramble, then Gleason let go of Fitzgerald, and
Fitzgerald spun and hit Gleason in the stomach with a hook, and though I was
already moving, and so were the others, it was all too fast. T.J. had Gleason
good. He twisted Gleason’s head like he was screwing the lid off a stubborn
pickle jar. Gleason’s sad toupee popped loose, soared above the light of the
flash, then came back to it like a hairy UFO and slapped the floor. Behind it
all, you could hear Gleason’s neck crack like a plastic swizzle stick.
“Stop them!” Fitzgerald yelled to T.J., and Charlie was on Fitzgerald, and
Leonard stepped in and kicked T.J. flush in the groin and drove his palm up
into the giant’s chin, and the giant grunted and reached for Leonard, and
Leonard moved away into shadow.
Charlie flew into me unconscious, courtesy of Fitzgerald’s left hook. I eased
Charlie aside, and me and Fitzgerald came together.
The rhythm of our punches and the constant kicking of Leonard against T.J.’s
body filled the room. I hit Fitzgerald with a jab and he hooked me to the body
and I felt a rib crack, but I’d had that before. It wasn’t poking through the
skin, so it was a pain I could isolate. I bobbed in and jabbed again and threw
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an overhand right, but Fitzgerald had moved out of the moon of light the
flashlight provided, and I threw my punch at movement instead of substance. He
leaned away and landed another in my ribs, same spot; it hurt like a knife had
gone there.
But I had something Fitzgerald didn’t have: a four-wheel drive. I kicked him
hard in the side of the leg, just above the knee, and he wobbled into the
light, and I could see him good now, and I hit him with a right in the face
and kicked with a left roundhouse to his ribs. He faded back into the darkness
and ran.
I turned to look at Leonard, just as Leonard scoop-kicked the inside of
T.J.’s knee, then side-snap-kicked to the front of it. T.J. went down with a
yell, hit the floorboards hard, rolled over and screamed, tried to get up, but
the shattered knee wouldn’t hold him.
I heard Fitzgerald break through glass and kick out window struttings, then I
heard him drop to the ground outside. I grabbed the flashlight and went after
him, my ribs throbbing. When I got to the window and started through, I heard
Fitzgerald scream like a man with a stick in his eye, then the scream turned
to an echo, then a flat, soul-breaking whine.
I dropped to the ground and shone the light around. The rain was still
pounding, and even with the light it was hard to see. I could hear him,
though: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .
Oh, Jesus, not this way.”
I went toward the sound, and it was coming from the old well. Fitzgerald had
tumbled down there in the darkness. I cautiously slid up to the pile of rubble
that had been the well’s rock foundation, bent over, and shone the light down.
Fitzgerald wasn’t saying anything now, he wasn’t making any kind of sound,
but he was alive. I could see his eyes blinking at the rain. The well was not
wide, and the fall had been hard, and there was all manner of rubble down
there—rocks from the curbing, limbs and brush, stagnant water—and he had hit
in such a way that his waist was twisted and his legs were turned at an angle
only pipe cleaners should make.
“I’ll get you out,” I said.
But he wasn’t listening. He bent his head toward his chest, and his ruined
body shifted and his chin went to his knees, which were too high up for anyone
but an acrobat, then he was still. He eased slowly into the water, then hung
on some kind of debris.
I didn’t need an M.D. to tell me the Reverend Fitzgerald had passed into
darkness. I held the light on him for a time, watched the rain beat him,
realized that the way he was now, he looked like nothing more than a peaceful
embryo waiting for birth.
I went back to the house by the porch and window. I didn’t see anyone lurking
about. I found where the one who had gotten away had fallen through the
boards, and down there I found something else too. Lying on his side on the
ground, a black bag over his head, hands bound behind his back, ankles tied,
was a child.
I got the boy out of there and pulled the bag off his head. He had a bandanna
around his mouth, and under that something stuffed in his mouth, and he was
having a hard time breathing. I got the thing out of his mouth and saw that it
was a sock. I sat him on the side of the floor where the boards had given
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away, let his legs dangle. He looked at me. He was shaking.
“Please,” he said.
“It’s OK, son. I’m not one of them.”
“Please.”
I saw there was something else down in the hole, and got back down in there
and grabbed it. It was a large piece of cloth, and under it was a book of the
Psalms. I wrapped the book up in the cloth, which wasn’t just a cloth at all,
and picked the boy up and made my way around the gap in the boards and carried
him into the kitchen. He was stiff and frightened. I sat him on the floor with
his back against the wall. He saw T.J. twisting on the floor, and he started
to struggle, but the ties on his hands and feet prevented any real movement.
He merely fell over and lay still.
“Easy,” I said. “You’re OK now.”
I glanced over and saw that Leonard had gotten Charlie’s handcuffs and was
putting them on T.J. T.J. kept yelling over and over, “Bubba. Bubba.”
When Leonard had T.J.’s arms cuffed behind his back, he limped over to where
me and the boy were.
“The runner lost the prizes,” I said, and lay the cloth and the Psalm book on
the floor.
Leonard got out his pocket knife, and the boy flinched and made a sound like
something dying.
“It’s OK,” Leonard said, and he cut the boy’s hands and feet free. “We got
’em for you, boy.”
Free, the child lay on the floor with his knees drawn to his chest. “They
hurt you?” Leonard asked him.
The boy didn’t answer. He stared at Leonard. Leonard stroked the boy’s head.
“Gonna be all right.”
I checked on Gleason. It didn’t take much of an examination to determine he
wouldn’t be coming around. His head was twisted at such an angle it made my
throat hurt. I found his toupee and stuck it on his head as best I could.
I went over then and looked at Charlie. He was lying on his back, conscious,
but weak. “Where’s it hurt?” I asked.
“My head,” Charlie said. “Jesus, what a lick. The world’s spinning. I’d
rather you hit me with the flashlight again.”
“Left hook,” I said. “He had a good one. He hasn’t got anything now.”
“You kill him?”
“The old well took care of him.” I worked Charlie’s coat off of him, folded
it up and put it under his head. “Man, you going to have to go shopping. This
suit coat is ruined. Pocket’s ripped clean the hell off of it.”
“Got his hand caught in it,” Charlie said. “Think Kmart’ll take it back?”
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“Even they got to draw a line somewhere.”
“Gleason?”
“Afraid not. Take it easy, now. You might have a concussion. I’ll get some
help.”
“Hanson don’t hear from us in a while, he’ll be up here.”
“I’m not going to wait that long, Charlie.”
I went back to Leonard. He said, “My ankle’s bad twisted. I’ve got down here
now and can’t get up. It’s swollen from me kicking that big devil. I must have
hit wrong. I think I’ll have to cut off the shoe.”
“Leonard, it’s not over yet.”
“I know. You’ll get him, won’t you? For me and you, and Uncle Chester?”
“You know it.”
“And Hanson for that matter. Boy is he gonna be pissed.”
“That’s how I like him best. Pissed . . . You’ll be all right?”
“Get him, Hap. Get him now.”
I folded the cloth around the Psalmbook and went away.
* * *
It took me a while to get from the Hampstead place back down to Uncle
Chester’s, but not as long as it had taken us to go up there. I wasn’t trying
to sneak and the rain had subsided. I thought all the way down. I thought
about how stupid I’d been. I was so mad my ribs didn’t even hurt.
When I got to Uncle Chester’s, I went on past and across the street to
MeMaw’s. The porch light was on, and Hiram’s muddy van was in the driveway.
The porch overhang was dripping water like rain off the bill of a cap. I
climbed on the porch and knocked on the door. A full minute passed before
Hiram answered. He was wearing a different set of clothes than I had seen him
wearing at the carnival. His hair was wet and his face was flushed and sweaty.
He was a little out of breath. He had his van keys in his hand.
I said, “How’s MeMaw?”
“The same,” he said. “I’m going up there.”
“Can I come in?”
“Man, I don’t mean to be rude, but I got to run. I was just going out.”
“I just need a minute,” I said and pushed my way inside, and he closed the
door. The house had the faint and pleasant aroma of home cooking. I looked at
the photographs on the wall, the picture of Jesus behind the stove. The cheap,
yellowed curtains. The place seemed a lot less clean than when I had seen it
last, and smaller, and darker.
Hiram said, “You look like hell.”
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“I been busy. I bet you’re fixing to light out, aren’t you?”
“What I was saying. I got to get back to the hospital. I need to get on back
right now, spell my sister.”
“I think you think the Reverend’s going to do some talking. I don’t think
you’re going to the hospital. I think you’re going to run like a goddamn
deer.”
He looked at me, trying to think of something to say. “The Reverend?” he
said.
“Did you know you and I just missed each other?” I said.
“How’s that?”
“I got something for you that’ll explain.”
I went over to the kitchen table, took the cloth out from under my arm, and
shook the book of Psalms out of it. I took the American flag, popped it wide,
let it float down over the table and the book.
“I believe you dropped this,” I said. “At least it wasn’t the Texas flag. . .
. You were going to wrap a child’s body in it, weren’t you, Hiram. Stick a
sheet from the Psalms in one of the magazines hidden up there. That day I was
over here, you quoted part of a Bible verse. That was from the Psalms, wasn’t
it? MeMaw saw you got religious training.”
“Hap—”
“You didn’t know I was at the house, Hiram. You thought the Reverend was
caught and going to talk, and you were just about to make a run for it. You
know what? Fitzgerald’s dead. And T.J., hell, he wouldn’t remember you an hour
from now. Not so it’d cause you any trouble anyway. But you panicked, and
that’s what nails you.”
“Hap—”
“Oh yeah, there is someone who’ll remember you. You dropped the kid too. The
one you were watching at the petting zoo. I bet he got a good look at you,
seeing how it wouldn’t have mattered had things gone according to plan. Simple
plan, huh? Fitzgerald loaded the kids back in the bus, said he had to stay for
some reason, would catch a ride, whatever, then you helped him grab the boy.
Or rather you helped trick the boy. He was someone Fitzgerald knew from the
church, someone he gave a free pass to, someone he was acting like a father
to, one of the lost ones. And T.J., he was on the bus, but he got off too, to
help. He’d do anything for his brother.”
“You got to understand, Hap. I didn’t start any of this.”
“I don’t need to understand anything. All I understand is you and Fitz and
T.J., every year, killed a young boy, cut him up and buried him under that
house. That’s all I need to understand. The why of it doesn’t mean a thing to
me.”
“I was going to stop. Really.”
“No. I don’t think so. And it doesn’t matter anyway.”
Hiram seemed to consider a moment, then whirled and snatched up one of the
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kitchen chairs and came for me. He brought it around and hit me on the side,
and my injured ribs exploded with pain, but I moved into him as he swung, and
cut the force of the blow. I grabbed his face with both my hands and slammed
my forehead forward, into his nose, and he jerked back, spewing blood. He
dropped the chair, fell leaning against the stove. The impact shook the wall,
and the picture of Jesus rocked on its nail and came loose and fell on top of
the stove and the glass shattered.
He came at me again, but I moved in with a right to the stomach, hooked a
left to his head. It wasn’t a good left. My ribs hurt too bad to put the
torque into it. He hit me high above the ear, not a good shot, but all those
blows I’d taken from Fitzgerld were wearing on me. I could feel my legs going
rubber. I covered my face with my arms and fist and let him chunk a while. He
wasn’t any better a boxer than he had been before, just a scrapper, and his
wind wasn’t any better either. The blows stung a little, but Leonard gave me
worse when we sparred.
After a few hits Hiram began to breathe hard through his mouth, gulping air
like a whale gulping plankton. I broke my cover and hooked between his hands
with a solid right and took out what breath he had left, then put him down
with a swinging elbow. That last technique made my injured rib move a way it
wasn’t supposed to move, and I felt it stab against my side. The damn thing
had been cracked, and now it had broken loose. I couldn’t help but lean
against the sink and feel sick, and when I turned to look at Hiram, he was up.
He’d gotten a butcher knife off the cabinet, and he lunged at me with it. He
wasn’t any better a knife fighter than he was a boxer.
I parried the lunge to the outside with my arm and grabbed his wrist and
pulled him off balance and tugged him against the sink counter and used my
free hand to strike him behind the head with my forearm, driving him down into
the porcelain sink. His head made a sound like a clay jar breaking and he went
out, would have hit the floor if his chin hadn’t hung on the edge of the sink.
I kicked his feet out from under him and he went down, sprawled on the floor
with blood running out of his mouth. His hand opened slowly, like a flower
blooming, and the knife lay free in his palm. I kicked it away. I stood over
him a moment, feeling something I couldn’t put a name to.
Finally, I leaned against the sink and tried to get my breath. I was starting
to lose it. MeMaw’s kitchen was spinning like a Disney World ride. I turned on
the faucet and ran some cold water into my hands and splashed it on my face
and rubbed it through my hair. That didn’t help much. I held my head low in
the sink beneath the faucet and let the water run over my neck and the back of
my skull. A few minutes later the spinning stopped and my rib really began to
ache.
I eased my way over to the phone and called the law, asked them to patch me
through to Lieutenant Hanson, and to tell him his good buddy Hap Collins was
on the line with a murderer in tow.
39.
Four nights after Hiram went down, MeMaw died, and two months later I was
still thinking about her. I was glad she never woke up. Never knew. Hiram had
lied about his sister being with MeMaw. He’d never called anyone. The need to
kill had been so strong inside him, he’d left his dying mother’s side to do
what he felt he had to do. The whole thing haunted me like a ghost.
I was thinking about this one warm but pleasant afternoon while me and
Leonard were out on the lake fishing, not catching anything, of course, just
drifting around in the boat, untangling moss from our lines and watching birds
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fly over.
At least most of the mosquitoes had called it a season. It was still warm
enough that a few of them came out on scouting missions, looking for a place
to land, a place to refuel, a place that generally seemed to be located
somewhere on the back of my neck, but an occasional quick slap took care of
that matter.
“Get your mind off of it,” Leonard said.
“What?”
“You just took the bait off your hook and cast the empty hook back in the
water. I’d say you’re thinking about Florida or Hiram.”
I had been thinking about Florida earlier. And Hanson. They were going to get
married. Florida had invited me to the wedding. By mail. She said she hoped
I’d come. Word from Charlie, who still shopped at Kmart, was that Hanson was
hoping I’d stay home. I kept thinking I ought to wish Florida and Hanson well
and be happy for them. That was the right thing to do, but I kept hoping she’d
miscalculate and get her period on her wedding night. It was the least fate
could do for me.
“It’s Hiram,” I said. “The whole mess.”
I reeled the line in, gingerly. My ribs were a lot better, but I still found
simple things painful. The doctor had wanted to put a body cast around me, but
I’d had broken ribs before. After he helped me get them set, I’d insisted on
an Ace bandage, wrapped tight. I figured another month from now I could put on
a Chubby Checker record and do the twist. Leonard had recovered just fine; the
sprain had gone away within a week.
“You know,” I said, “I kinda liked Hiram. He had a good side.”
“You kinda liked his bullshit. There’s no balance in having a good side when
you got the other side he had. Hell, you don’t know he had a good side. He had
a good front, man. That guy had more masks than a gaggle of trick-or-treaters.
Look the way he went off and left his mother so he could kill that kid.”
“I guess. You think he’ll get life, or a needle full of shit?”
“I pray for the needle. I’d like to be there to push the plunger in the
fucker, or maybe just forget the dope and jab him to death with the needle.”
“The thing that worries me about you, Leonard, is you have such a hard time
getting in touch with your true feelings.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna get me an analyst can help me out on that. Tell me why I’m
queer, too. They like stuff like that. He’ll want to know if I dream about my
daddy’s dick. Hell, maybe I’m lucky, shrink’ll be some blond stud that’s queer
himself.”
“Hope springs eternal.”
“Listen, man, you worry too much about the psychology of things. That stuff’s
just head voodoo. It don’t mean a thing. You took all the psychiatric and
psychology degrees in the world, balanced that paper against the truth, there
wouldn’t be enough there to wipe a baby’s ass on.”
“Maybe. But it figures with Fitzgerald, if the stuff Hiram says was true, and
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I think it was, but Hiram, I don’t know.”
“You want everything to come up neat, Hap. That’s bullshit. What Hiram said
about Fitzgerald is probably true, what he said about himself is probably
bullshit. What you’re doing, is still blaming yourself for not figuring Hiram
sooner.”
“I should have seen it. Shit, everything was there. Boxes of flags in Hiram’s
van, and each of the bodies had been wrapped in cloth, and he had quoted that
piece out of Psalms. Add to that the fact he was here every year at the time
of the murders, knew the Reverend and had a history with him. Toss in the
religious connection, the way he’d acted that night I handed him Ivan, all
drugged and dying, the way he looked at the kid like I’d given him a gift from
God. The thought of that, knowing what I know now, gives me chills.”
“Monday morning quarterbacking. I’ve heard it all, Hap, and frankly, I’m
tired of it. Look, amigo, I don’t blame myself. You shouldn’t blame yourself.
Hiram was cool, and Fitzgerald, hell, he was ripe for the part and was guilty
too. We had our eyes on him and couldn’t see the whole of it. That flag shit,
hell, who would have thought of that? Only way it would come together is the
way it did. You found the flag and the kid. But the thing is, another kid
didn’t go down. We got ’em all. I’m gonna feel sorry for anyone, it’s T.J.,
rotting away in some state institution. Not that I’d want the fucker on the
street, but in his case, I got a tear or two for him.”
“I don’t see any.”
“I cry on the inside. And I hope every day the poor bastard will die in his
sleep. He ain’t nothing for this world. Shit, Fitzgerald told T.J. his own
dick was a snake, he’d have believed it. Cut it off and tied it in a knot had
Fitzgerald wanted him to.”
“No doubt about that.”
“Actually, thing that cheers me at night is thinking of that motherfucker
falling down that well. I wish I could have been close enough to hear his
bones break.”
“Your humanity overwhelms me, Leonard.”
“Now forget Hiram, the whole mess. Set your hook. Personally, I put my next
bait on the hook, I’m gonna pretend I’m putting the needle in Hiram’s eye. . .
. Come on man, let’s catch at least a couple perch. I’d like fish for dinner.”
“You know what it is, Leonard?”
“No, but I’m gonna find out.”
“It’s the fact they were the same, and yet, they were different.”
“Hiram and Fitzgerald?”
“Yeah. I mean, Hiram says they were the same, but what do you think?”
“Same thing I thought yesterday. They’re both better off dead, and when Hiram
goes and makes it a duo, I’ll buy a party hat and a noisemaker. But since you
just got to talk about it, let me give you my last word, brother. Fitzgerald,
if Hiram can be believed—and like you, I believe this part—got jacked around
early on, right? What did you call him?”
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“Psychotic.”
“Right. And Hiram, he was a psychopath. No matter what story he tells about
how he and Fitzgerald were turned into what they were. I don’t buy it. Least
not in Hiram’s case.”
I remembered the story Hiram told, or at least I remembered it as best Hanson
would tell it to me later. Hiram told the law and the psychiatrists he
couldn’t help himself; he’d been made that way. Said when he was a boy he
spent time with Fitz, and Fitz’s father raped not only his son, but him as
well. This, he said, was why the old man killed his wife. Not that he thought
she might be sleeping around. That was just the bullshit he told me to
distance himself from Fitzgerald. The old man’s wife caught the elder
Fitzgerald in the act with him and Fitz. Hiram said they watched the old man
murder her and wrap her in a flag from the church. Then he made them help load
the body in his car, go to the Hampstead house with him, watch him dispose of
her by candlelight, all the while telling them it was the will of God. Words
confirmed by the image on the wall, the water-spot face of Christ.
Hiram said the old man told him he ever said a word, he’d do the same to
MeMaw, so Hiram had been quiet all those years. But the memory wouldn’t go
away, and he’d wake up at night and see the blood and think of it oozing
through that flag. He’d envision the water spot on the wall and smell the
fresh dirt beneath the house, and he’d feel angry. He developed an urge to
light fires and make little animals suffer. He did both on the sly.
When he was a grown man, animals weren’t enough. And he and Fitzgerald,
scarred by the same crime at the same time, found a linking between them. The
murders began. They felt they were doing the will of God, getting rid of those
sad cases, those admonitions. Or so said Hiram.
“You see, man,” Leonard said, “Hiram was lying. He understood the reasons
Fitzgerald was the way he was too well to be operating by them himself. It had
been Fitzgerald who had believed in what he was doing; he was the one with the
psychotic delusions that he was doing God’s work as given him to do by his
daddy. But you can’t let Fitzgerald off the hook either. He made a choice. And
there was something else, man. He had those porno mags same as Hiram, and the
sex with the kids, they can say that was part of the pattern, but it all
sounds like a power trip to me, plain and simple. But let’s give Fitzgerald a
little room and say it isn’t all his fault. Not much room, but enough to turn
around in, and then let’s go on to Hiram.
“Hiram, he got a bad break for a kid too, but hell, that wasn’t his
environment. He’d got over it in time, dealt with it, told eventually, he’d
wanted to. But he liked the killing from the start, was born with a wire
twisted and a piston loose. I bet he was doing them animals in before he ever
got butt-fucked and in on that murder. With Hiram, it was like dropping ole
Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch. He was born and bred for it, same as some
dogs come out bad and others come out good, and they come from the same stock.
MeMaw was good people, but that didn’t mean the genes didn’t come together in
Hiram crooked somewhere. Got the wrong combination.”
“Then in a way,” I said, “that means he couldn’t help it.”
“Bad dogs can’t help but bite either. I’ve seen ’em born vicious and just get
worse as they got older, no matter how good you treated ’em. They can’t help
it, but I couldn’t help putting a bullet through their heads either. You don’t
bite me, or try to bite me but once. . . . Shit, Hap, some things just are.
Hiram was a predator from birth, and he enjoyed feeding Fitzgerald’s religious
frenzy, so in turn he could feed his own needs. Think about what they found in
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Tyler.”
When Hiram’s home was checked into, the police in Tyler found souvenirs, more
souvenirs than could have come from those dead boys under the Hampstead place.
It looked as if once a year in LaBorde hadn’t been enough for Hiram. In time,
if he talked more, the Tyler police felt certain they’d clear up a lot of
local cases involving missing children.
“No telling how many kids Hiram’s nailed,” Leonard said. “Here, in Tyler, on
his route. He had the perfect job for his little hobby. And he’d kept right on
doing it until he was stopped or the grave got him.”
“I know,” I said. “I guess there’s a part of me thinks somewhere along the
line everyone could have been saved. Maybe not come out perfect, but not come
out a monster either.”
“Hap, my man, there is evil in the world. True evil. It doesn’t twirl its
mustache and it doesn’t wear black and it doesn’t slink and it doesn’t come in
any one color or sex. Sometimes evil comes from good places, like MeMaw, and
sometimes it can wear all kinds of good faces and talk good as anyone can
talk, but it’s just a face and it’s just talk. Evil’s real, man. Same as
good.”
“And what about T.J.? How does he fit into your theory?”
“I don’t care if he fits at all, Hap. Now shut up and fish.”
I baited my hook and did just that, but I never could get my mind right. I
kept thinking about it all, wondering if the kid we’d saved would have a
chance now, or if he’d just go right back to the street. I wondered if at this
very moment he might be sticking a shot of horse into his arm.
We didn’t catch any fish. Leonard was pissed. His mouth was set for a finny
friend. We stopped off at Kroger’s on the way home and went in there to buy a
fish to fry. They were all out. We got some fish sticks and took them home and
baked them in the oven.
* * *
Later that month, on a cool night with the sky black and the stars bright, I
moved away from Uncle Chester’s. The work on the house was completed, except
for painting, and Leonard decided to live there at least until spring. At that
time, I was supposed to move back and help paint the place, then he’d put it
up for sale.
But for me, for now, I wanted away from there and the remains of the drug
house next door, MeMaw’s house, the woods out back, and the Hampstead place. I
felt it all closing in on me at night, as if the houses, the remains of the
drug house, were living things that could reach out and touch me.
I suppose, believing that way in some primitive part of my mind, I should
have believed Uncle Chester’s bottle tree could protect me, but it had become
easier to believe the evil than the good.
Me and Leonard had a big dinner that night, and after dinner I shook hands
with him, put my stuff in the back of the pickup, and we stood around outside
and listened to the wind in the bottle tree. It was a cool wind. It was an
agreeable night.
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“You be true, Hap.”
“Don’t be surprised you don’t hear from me for a week,” I said.
“All right.”
“Don’t be surprised you hear from me tomorrow.”
He smiled at me. “Drive careful, man.”
I hugged him and drove away from there, started home, but didn’t make it. I
went out Highway 7 instead. I drove on out to the scenic overlook and went up
there and parked. I got out and lay on the hood of the truck with my back to
the windshield and looked at the sky. It was a beautiful night and the stars
were as clear and bright as a young girl’s eyes. Beautiful like that time
Florida and I had come up here. It was hard remembering exactly who I had been
then. I felt older now and the world seemed sadder, and it was as if
everything I had ever learned was ultimately pointless. When I had lain here
with Florida beside me that night, not so long ago—but in another way, a
million years past—she told me we could see Forever. And we could. But Forever
then was a wonderful place, full of mystery and hope and eternity.
Tonight, I could still see Forever, but Forever was nothing to see.
JOER. LANSDALE, native of East Texas, is the winner of the British Fantasy
Award, the American Mystery Award, and four Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror
Writers of America.
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